The Stark Contrast Between GOP’s Self-Criticism in 2012 and Democrats’ Blame-Everyone-Else Posture Now

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the Senate and House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced no words: “The Obama years have created a Democratic Party that’s essentially a smoking pile of rubble.”

One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated, and wrecked political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats, one would be quite mistaken.

This Accept-No-Responsibility, Blame-Everyone-Else posture stands in stark contrast to how the Republican National Committee reacted in 2012, after it lost the popular vote for the fifth time in six presidential elections. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called Mitt Romney’s loss “a wake-up call,” and he was scathing about his party’s failures: “There’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement. … So, there’s no one solution: There’s a long list of them.”

The RNC’s willingness to admit its own failures led to a comprehensive 1oo-page report, issued only a few months after its 2012 defeat, that was unflinching in its self-critique. One of the report’s co-chairs, GOP strategist Sally Bradshaw, warned upon issuance of the “autopsy” that “public perception of our party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents and many minorities think Republicans don’t like them or don’t want them in our country.”

The report itself also took aim at the GOP’s chosen candidate, containing analysis that was “pointed in its critique of Mitt Romney, specifically pointing to his ‘self deportation’ comment as turning off Hispanic voters.” The report began by warning that at the federal level, the GOP “is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.” Rather than maligning the voters who rejected his party, Preibus accepted responsibility for losing them: “To those who have left the party, let me say this, we want to earn your trust again, to those who have yet to trust us, we welcome you with open arms.”

One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination, and ultimately the presidency, not only ignored many of the autopsy’s core recommendations but embodied everything it warned against. Nonetheless, the reaction of Republican officials after 2012 was to accept responsibility for their loss, admit their own fundamental errors, and vow to fix what was wrong with themselves: the exact antithesis of the instinct Democrats have thus far displayed in the face of a much more sweeping and crushing defeat.

The self-exonerating mentality of Democrats is particularly remarkable in light of how comprehensive their failures have been. After the 2012 election, the GOP immersed itself in unflinching self-critique even though it still held a majority in the House and dominated governorships and state houses. By rather stark contrast, the Democrats have now been crushed at all levels of electoral politics, yet appear more self-righteously impressed with themselves, more vindicated in their messaging and strategic choices, than ever before.

While Democrats point fingers at anyone they can find, the evidence mounts that all critical sectors of their party’s apparatus fundamentally failed. Their renowned strategic geniuses were blinded with arrogance and error: “David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, said that Clinton was a ‘one hundred per cent’ lock and advised nervous Democrats to stop ‘wetting the bed,’” reports The New Yorker’s David Remnick this week. The party’s operatives and pundits used bullying tactics to clear the field for an obviously weak and vulnerable candidate, and then insisted on nominating her despite those weaknesses, many of which were self-inflicted, and in the face of mountains of empirical evidence that her primary-race opponent was more likely to win; Remnick writes:

In a retrospective mood, staffers said that, as Obama told me, Clinton would have been an “excellent” President, but they also voiced some dismay with her campaign: dismay that she had seemed to stump so listlessly, if at all, in the Rust Belt; dismay that the Clinton family’s undeniable taste for money could not be erased by good works; dismay that she was such a middling retail politician.

Clinton’s campaign staff, drowning in a sense of inevitability and entitlement (again), ignored pleas from worried local officials for more resources to states that proved decisive. The Democratic Party’s last two chairs were compelled to resign in scandal (one from CNN, the other from the DNC itself). And the party is widely perceived to be devoted to elite Wall Street tycoons and war-making interests at the expense of pretty much everyone else, and chose a candidate who could not have been better designed to exacerbate those concerns if that had been the goal. As Steve Bannon put it: “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s [anti-establishment] message.”

In sum, there is a large list of fundamental, systemic problems with virtually every aspect of the Democratic Party. Those are the deficiencies that explain its monumental electoral defeats. Acknowledging one’s own responsibility for failure is always difficult, which is why scapegoating and finger-pointing at others is so tempting.

The Democrats’ failures need not be permanent. The two parties’ fortunes are often cyclical; after 2004, many Republicans believed they had created a permanent majority, and then many Democrats believed the same after their own sweeping victories of 2006 and 2008. Democrats have won the popular vote in six out of the last seven elections. Had Clinton won the electoral college as expected, and been able to control the next Supreme Court appointment(s), Democrats would have controlled two of the three branches of government, and one could have plausibly argued that they were the dominant political faction in the U.S., at least at the federal level. So none of this is irreversible.

But as is true of anyone who wants to reverse their own failures, Democrats need to accept responsibility and blame, and stop pretending that they were just the victims of other people’s failures and bad acts. They’re not divinely entitled to support from voters, nor to an unimpeded march to victory for their preferred candidate, nor to a press that in unison turns itself into Vox or a Saturday morning MSNBC show by suppressing reporting that reflects negatively on them and instead confines itself to hagiography. In fact, this entitlement syndrome that is leading them to blame everyone but themselves should be added very near the top of the list of self-critiques they need to begin working promptly to address.

Correction: November 18, 2016
This article erroneously noted that the GOP controlled the House and Senate after the 2012 election; it has been edited to reflect that while they did control the House, they won Senate control in 2014.

Wait! Before you go on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadn’t done it?
Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. Who would hold party elites accountable to the values they proclaim to have? How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters weren’t on the beat?
The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. We don’t have ads, so we depend on our members — 24,000 and counting — to help us hold the powerful to account. Joining is simple and doesn’t need to cost a lot: You can become a sustaining member for as little as $3 or $5 a month. That’s all it takes to support the journalism you rely on.Become a Member

Contact the author:

I think Glenn keeps saying things a lot of people do not want to hear. The structural issues like voter suppression…Dems have had years to fight against this and have done nothing to my mind to fix it.with nancy pelosi getting re-elected and clyburn getting behind lobbyists like Dean or the Podesta-backed Jaimie Harrison instead of a true progressive like Keith Ellison…there will be more years in the wilderness for this party going forward. Glenn you are doing the right thing by forcing people to look at the person they chose for her defeat instead of what has been going on…it is everyone else’s fault..because that is easier…life is like politics…it is easier to blame everyone else for our failures instead of. even if Repubs did not follow their advice…they criticized their candidate more than the Dems are…The Clintons have that much power in the party…Pelosi lost a third of her delegation in the vote for House Minority Leader….until they start winning state legislatures and governorships in the middle of the coutnry…they are toast….why is no one talking about a Democrat having a chance to win a Senate seat in Louisiana or a Democrat winning the governors job in NC???

Last weekend, Assistant House Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn of South Carolina sent a letter to House Democrats arguing that the next chairman needs to be engaged on a full-time basis.

“The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) primary goal is to win the presidency,” the letter, obtained by POLITICO, said. “Winning the presidency in 2020 is possible. But it will require, in our not-so-humble opinion, a 24/7 bottom-to-top rebuilding effort.”

That actually is congruent with the Democrat Party’s refusal to engage in self-criticism; in that that letter is meant to delegitimize Ellison’s candidacy, which represents the type of reconstruction the Democratic Party should engage in, in favor of supporting one of two other candidates, both of whom are lobbyists and represent a continuation of the Corporate Democrat legacy.

We get it Glenn – the Democrats should have nominated your preferred candidate and are now being punished because they didn’t. You’re frustrated that they’re not immediately embracing the lessons that you think they should be embracing. Fair enough.

But your insistent focus on this is getting weird, and if you spend too much longer stuck down this side-alley you will lose long-time readers like me.

Agree with this comment completely. I was a regular reader but am starting to find this incredibly frustrating to keep reading over and over in different guises. Also the RNC made their study a few months after – we’re not that far in yet.

And then most importantly of all – what was the result of this great self-reflection? First it was…Rubio? Bush? And then actually riding on the coattails of Trump? So what is the great purpose of that post-mortem if it accomplished absolutely nothing?

Please Glenn, use your talents to get on to other real issues. How about voter suppression – especially in minority areas? Or the ways that some organizations and political figures are spreading Islamophobic ideas in our country? That seems like something a respected investigative journalist like yourself should be focusing on.

Why did Clinton lose to the least popular Presidential Candidate of all time?

Why was it even close, when by all accounts, this should have been a double-digit landslide of an election. They snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, and every person defending their loss should be ashamed, or embarassed.

The Democrats could not get punished enough for their corruption and prime responsibility for the election of Trump.

Best case? The party dissolves and flushes itself down the toilet. Their whining and pant pissing since the election show how far beyond salvation they are, not worth a penny of donation or a second of time for their candidates.

I have notified my Dem Senators and Rep that I will be voting for any progressive candidate BUT the Democrats, up and down the ticket. To their emails asking for donations, I respond that when they indicate that they have become third party candidates, then and only then, will I consider a donation to their campaign.

A higher percentage of Sanders’ voters went for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton supporters who voted for Obama in the 2008 Presidential election. You’re whining in the face of the obvious failures of the Democratic corporate elite is astonishing.

And yes, Senator Sanders had a better chance to defeat Trump. In addition to being the superior Democratic candidate in the primaries…

I agree…I got off their email lists because they kept sending me choices that were not progressive. I came to the intercept website because they did not drink the clinton inevitability kool-aid…the clinton backed echo chamber of many online voices…vox/slate/salon/mother jones/the nation…wapo/new york times in terms of newspapers…msnbc/cnn/abc/pbs/cbc/nbc…got this all wrong ….I was frustrated from the opposite side…clinton was not inevitable…

The GOP autopsy, which they ignored, also applies to the Democrats who, no doubt, will ignore it as well. For years I’ve watched Dems on TV news unable to utter a simple declarative sentence, be unable to explain to the American public what is actually happening in Washington, and then discuss issues they know nothing about. My favorites were the Dem surrogates talking about the Keystone XL Pipeline who had no idea idea how many jobs it would actually create. (Hint: between 20 and 35 permanent jobs.)

The biggest beef is what Dems do and don’t do at the state level. When my state of Pennsylvania wanted to institute voter I.D., I contacted PA Dem headquarters to offer myself and my car to any voter who needed help. I was told that the party had nothing set up to deal with that problem. When states purge voters from the rolls using deliberately incorrect cross-state lists, it’s the ACLU suing in the courts, not the Dems.

Dems played fast and loose with primary and caucus rules, rigged the DNC, bribed the super delegates with quid pro quo, screwed Bernie delegates and volunteers during the convention, and hired Hilbots to troll the internet. Of course they’re going to blame everybody but themselves.

While I agree with the premise that honest self-reflection is lacking in the Democratic party at the moment, I’d argue that Priebus may have been the only one to do so for the RNC, and his “reforms” were mostly cosmetic at best. We had less wide-spread “legitimate rape”-type quotes from candidates this year, but was that because Republicans didn’t make them, or because Trump soaked up most the media attention through his behavior? Did the behavior of the GOP fundamentally change at the candidate level? It clearly changed for the worse at the Presidential polictis level, but I’d be interested to see if it changed much at the state level. Further, the article insists that Democrats have been “crushed” in electoral processes everywhere, but does not examine that in many states, Democrats are badly gerrymandered, and while the popular vote in many of these states may be towards Democrats, the state house seats and Congressional seats do not reflect this even somewhat closely.
My non-expert analysis of this election is that Democrats hurt themselves badly and alienated working folks when it was essentially shown the Democratic primary was effectively rigged for Clinton – she had a majority of the superdelegates before the first primary votes were cast. This must be reformed in the future for voters to feel their candidate is being given a fair shake, and to come behind the prevailing candidate in the future. I feel in this circumstance Bernie’s folks either didn’t vote, voted reluctantly for Clinton, or went over to Trump. Had the Primary been viewed as fair, she might have gotten more votes.
There’s also the known versus unknown debate – Clinton was a known factor with potential endless scandal (whether real or asserted by the GOP machine), while Trump, having his own legal issues, virtually got a pass on these because it hasn’t endlessly been in the public eye like Clinton’s has. It will remain to be seen if the media continues to give him a pass – there has been virtually no meaningful media scrutiny of the fact he just settled a fraud lawsuit over Trump University and has dozens more lawsuits pending against him. It seems to be simply glazed over in the fight to try and figure out what his next tweets will be about.

It’s probably been close to 20 years since I felt compelled to “enjoy” a holiday meal with seldom seen relatives, always wanting to argue their version of current politics, and I don’t miss that “stuff” one bit. Those conversations were always about who’s to blame.

My version of giving thanks – to whistleblowers this Friday, instead of celebrating the manifest genocide destiny of Native Americans on traditional Thursday, also gives me greater peace.

And how exactly was Clinton “wildly unpopular” when she got 1.5 million more votes than Captain Weaselhair?

And I very distinctly remember the GOP post-2008 AND post-2012 constantly whining that the election was stolen, that Obama rigged it somehow, that it was those (blacks, hispanics, jews, muslims–pick one or all) who voted for him, not quote-unquote “real Americans.” The GOP’s so-called ‘autopsy’ report was the lone voice saying different, and it was promptly ignored by everybody.

“And how exactly was Clinton “wildly unpopular” when she got 1.5 million more votes than Captain Weaselhair?”

?! She was the most disliked nominee in her party’s history and just lost to the most unpopular major party nominee in history, despite massively outspending him and with lots more establishment support. The person she lost to got less votes than Bush in 2004, despite a much larger current voting age population, and he still won. You also might find this to be a bit of a surprise, but there are people that vote that don’t vote in your primaries. See, about 40% of the public doesn’t identify with either party, and a little over a quarter identify as Democrats. Sanders did much better with independents. She was also was never going to get much Republican support, because she’s Hillary freaking Clinton.

Republicans have been engineering Hilary Clinton’s defeat since 1993. No surprise something they flung stuck. The Republican losses in 92, 96,08 and 12 were viewed by them as stolen elections and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were illegitimate. After their “autopsy” the failed to follow the recommendations instead relying on s last hurrah of white “power” from miserable people. The Right and alt-right will do in spades what pundits blame for Democrat defeats. Their focus on identity politics will backfire on all of us. They have no plan for the white working class and are encouraging extreme nationalism and reinforcing racial, economic,social,educational and political. Trump’s absurd responses to criticism will be taken up by neo-nazis. current day white supremacists,etc. Trump is an unprincipled opportunist with only content for people like me. What happened to acknowledgement of coordinated Republication voter suppression. Political observers let in go for the post 12 days. The House Benghazi Committee form to sling dung hoping something would come up in their favor. Clinton would have ridden out the storm if not for Comet ignoring all Justice Department about following norms developed over many decades. Why doesn’t someone speak the truth about how poorly the 2 party serves the citizens of this country with all their varied political views and interests.

I can see them telling American people: see? That’s the president you elected, so don’t make the same mistake next election our candidate was perfect and now you must realize about that. On the other hand, Trump was godsend for Republicans just as it was for the vice president interests, as mentioned in another article here in the intercept one of the Republican candidates would have most likely lost to Clinton and then Trump showed up. .

It appears the the Republican’s self critique in 2012 was dead wrong. Trump intensified divisions, brought identity politics to a dangerous extreme and sailed into the nomination and White House. The GOP base showed us what they want and both the RNC and DNC couldn’t provide it. That’s a good thing.

I’m all for the DNC getting it together, in a major way, but much of the analysis of this election seems way off to me. This feels like an escalation of the 30+ year Culture War and little else. Resentment of 8 years of Obama, misplaced blame. I doubt that Trump’s transparent populism contributed much. This base would never support Sanders in any significant way.

I hope this shakes up the DNC, I really do, but let’s not create a false narrative around what just happened. It was a fascist campaign and voters responded.

I think Sanders is a great model for a progressive future. Do not pander to conservative middle America, stick to progressive beliefs without concern of polling data. This is partly what is wrong with Clinton and the DNC, despite the popular belief that Democrats’ elitism lost the election, they’ve been pandering to middle America since the 1990s. Sanders refusal to shy away from a socialist label is proof that he didn’t go there, and voters responded in a big way.

..also, the left lost white, conservative Middle America a long time ago. The DNC has been pandering to them ever since, trying to get them back and they lost the left in doing so. We don’t have to name call and blame but we should move back to the left to make gains, not worry about conservative voters. Tey can come along if they like what they see. Attraction rather than promotion. Clinton won the popular vote despite unprecedented dislike from both sides. We are not outnumbered.

Ambassador Stevens just got his ultimate revenge as Hillary doomed herself in the same careless, callous, frivolous way that she has conducted her entire tenure in government. In the election, we the “deplorables” must have “mis-heard” or “mis-spoke” or “mis-remembered” whom to vote for as we gleefully pulled our election levers for “ANYBODY BUT HILLARY”, and thus Hillary got the result she so richly deserved. Apparently all of us non-college edumacated voters must have misread her slogan– “Better To Get Her”…. and we agreed.

But she did apologize the day after the election, however. Think about that: She apologized for thinking she could win, and that by making that decision, the country ended up with a buffoon, a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court and both Houses of Congress. But maybe Biden or Bernie would have lost, too. Maybe Trump is the buffoon that enough people – not the most people, but enough people – wanted to send to Washington because they hate the way government works.

Bernie would have crushed Trump. He was always beating Trump, in every poll, and usually by double digits. Bernie was not under the cloud of an active FBI criminal investigation for most of the campaign – there are too many things to name. Suffice to to say that the Democrats could have stood up a ham sandwich to run against Trump, and the ham sandwich would have won. Hillary Clinton was in the most literal sense possible the ONLY Democrat that could have lost to Trump.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly called for better relations with Russia. The way forward for US policy in Syria for the Trump administration is clear if you listen to the Syrian government, the Russian ambassador to the UK and Zaid Jilani at the Intercept: support the Syrian government and Russia in their bombing campaign in Aleppo. Al-Jazeera reported this morning that there are now no operating hospitals in Aleppo because of the renewed bombing campaign on Aleppo by the Syrian regime. Assad targeted the remaining hospitals using barrel bombs to terrorize the civilian population.

According to Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moalem:

“……..”What we want from the new administration is not just to stop support (for armed groups)… but to curb those regional powers that are supporting those groups… we have to wait,” he said during a televised news conference in Damascus…….”

According to the Mirror in an interview with the UK Russian ambassador:

“……..Russia is to ask Donald Trump to give it the OK to carry on bombing Syria…….In an exclusive article for the Sunday Mirror, President Vladimir Putin ’s London ambassador says Russia has been trying to persuade US president Barack Obama to agree to the air strikes…..“We have been trying to coordinate with this US Administration. We’ll continue doing so with the next one.”……”

“……..Appointing neoconservatives or those who think like them to his administration would be a clear betrayal by Trump of the principles he campaigned on: opposition to the wars of choice in Libya and Iraq, the establishment of safe zones in Syria, and detente with Russia…….”

So instead of standing by and watching Russia (effectively) carpet bomb Aleppo, the US could join the party taking “détente” to a new level of friendship. The US military might even learn something from the Russians on targeting aid convoys and hospitals. What is important according to Jilani is that Trump stand by his “principles”. Hey, who knows? This might motivate the “Stop the War Coalition” to change their slogan from “stop the west” to “join the east”.

“.,,,Appointing neoconservatives or those who think like them to his administration would be a clear betrayal by Trump of the principles he campaigned on: opposition to the wars of choice in Libya and Iraq, the establishment of safe zones in Syria, and detente with Russia…….” -Zaid Jilani

Let me compliment you on your new commenting format. You finally took my advice and relegated your other (unreadable) format into the dustbin of history. None the less, you can still do better – especially with the content. The US made a strategic mistake by allowing Assad off the hook when he used chemical weapons on the Syrian population. He crossed the red line of Obama and should have paid a heavy military price. Additionally, Obama should also have created a no fly zone at that time. The Assad regime might have fallen ridding the world of one of the most desperate war criminals in the world today. It wouldn’t have saved the 25,000-50,000 already murdered in detention, but there are still 200,000 being held by the Assad regime. So yes, the US should have bombed Assad into the “Stone Age”. That doesn’t mean the US should have carpet bombed Damascus, but the US should have destroyed Assad’s military capability to conduct war from the air where just yesterday, Assad targeted hospitals in Aleppo with barrel bombs – a signature bombing by the Assad regime.

Furthermore, the Russians (and the Assad regime) targeted civilians, hospitals, field clinics and aid convoys in and around Aleppo – all war crimes. This has been well documented. The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, focused on the war crimes committed from the indiscriminate bombing and targeting of civilians and hospitals by the Russia and the Assad militaries in Eastern Aleppo (al-Jazeera):

“…….The siege and bombing of eastern Aleppo in Syria constitute “crimes of historic proportions” that have caused heavy civilian casualties amounting to “war crimes”, according to the top United Nations human rights official…….al Hussein’s comments on Friday came during a special session of the UN human rights council called by Britain to set up a special inquiry into violations, especially in Aleppo’s rebel-held east where an estimated 275,000 civilians are besieged by a Syrian government offensive backed by Russia…….Zeid said Aleppo is a “slaughterhouse” and called for major powers to put aside their differences and refer the situation in Syria to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)……..”

According to Amnesty International (March 3, 2016):

“……. Russian and Syrian government forces appear to have deliberately and systematically targeted hospitals and other medical facilities over the last three months to pave the way for ground forces to advance on northern Aleppo, an examination of airstrikes by Amnesty International has found……Even as Syria’s fragile ceasefire deal was being hammered out, Syrian government forces and their allies intensified their attacks on medical facilities……“Syrian and Russian forces have been deliberately attacking health facilities in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. But what is truly egregious is that wiping out hospitals appears to have become part of their military strategy,” said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International……….”

When the US didn’t act in Syria, Russia stepped in to fill the void – and has been bombing targets in much the same way they bombed Grozny – indiscriminately. The hypocrisy of the far left was pointed out in brutal fashion by Daily Beast writer, Sam Charles Hamad.

“……While today’s left is more than willing to speak about perceived Western crimes, it is all too often caught up in a type of politics that not only makes a virtue out of not condemning crimes committed by powerful non-Western actors, namely Russia, China, and Iran, but that often explicitly or implicitly supports such crimes…….”

It’s an easy way to unwrap his hypocrisy; no wonder he doesn’t like it:

craigsummersvcraigsummers

“Furthermore, the Russians (and the Assad regime) targeted civilians, hospitals, field clinics and aid convoys in and around Aleppo – all war crimes.”

– blaming others for their war crimes. . .

“I suppose you would have to ask that question to Saddam Hussain who was responsible [for the US-led sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent victims and were were denounced as “war crimes” and “genocide” by the two successive administrators of the program who both resigned in protest]. . .in the first place”

– blaming someone else for US war crimes

Basic moral principles. . .
“. . . if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others…plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil” – Noam Chomsky
. . .are just beyond his comprehension.

So he’ll cut n’ paste some more Wikipedia and mindlessly regurgitate some mainstream cant (“Assad must go. . .Assad must go”), unable to realize that nothing others say or do can justify his hypocrisy.

Formats are important, bahhummingbug. After a year of his unreadable responses to my posts, he changed to the more normal format most everyone uses below the line. I kept trying to help him, but he insisted on posting in the same format.

Have you received an invitation to the new site run by Mona? It seems to be designed to bring together some of the old Salon posters frightened away by debate on this site. I keep waiting for my invitation, but so far it hasn’t come. I can certainly envision some of the conversation:

“Zionists are racists and fascists” – Mona

“I agree Mona” – Doug Salzmann

“Jews run the US Congress and US foreign policy” – Mona

“I agree Mona” – Doug Salzmann

“US foreign policy and our support for Israel is the cause of Islamic terrorism” – Mona

This is laughable. Yes the RNC conducted an “autopsy” after 2012. They then went on to ignore it in both the 2014 and 2016 campaigns.

While we are calling people to task for not being self critical, I hope Greenwald and the Intercept are ready to atone for their role in enabling this monster. This site went full in on nonsense email stories while giving Trump a pass. The approach to “reporting” was to proceed from a pre-determined conclusion of Clinton’s corruption and then fit the story to the conclusion.

The Wikileaks Poedesta, DNC and Clinton Foundation emails were anything but “Nonsense” Emails.

Glenn didn’t give Clinton 1, Bush 2, Obama or Clinton 2 and Trump 1 “a pass.” He held everyone of them to the same high standards one would hope an attorney with a background in constutional law should demand the most powerful elected officials in the world be held. As we all should.

Clintons DNC and Hillary herself revealed themselves for what they have become and what they truly were in their own hand leaving every objective reader to freely draw their own conclusions and rendering any editorial guidance assistance from any news outlet
linking to them superfluous to their own reasoned analysis of this first hand source material.

The Intercept explored the corrupt and immoral aspects of both campaigns using the best evidence at hand on both cadidates.

After checking out the links from the paragraph below, I’m absolutely dumbfounded at how little introspection or self-awareness the Democratic Party has after such an obvious failure. And Eichenwald’s ranting Twitter feed (which is hard to do with 140 characters) looks like he had a literal mental breakdown some time around November 9th.

“Democrats have spent the last 10 days flailing around blaming everyone except for themselves, constructing a carousel of villains and scapegoats — from Julian Assange, Vladimir Putin, James Comey, the electoral college, ‘fake news,’ and Facebook, to Susan Sarandon, Jill Stein, millennials, Bernie Sanders, Clinton-critical journalists, and, most of all, insubordinate voters themselves — to blame them for failing to fulfill the responsibility that the Democratic Party, and it alone, bears: to elect Democratic candidates.”

Are you kidding us with this “article”. You’re claiming the GOP “won” this election? That the GOP’s “soul searching” is what resulted in Trump’s win in spite of how he STOMPED every single legit GOP contender in the primary? GOP is just lucky that he started culling from some legit GOP insiders for his cabinet. The Republicans might have gotten lucky–they’s see once Trump takes office.

No. Glenn simply said the RNC publicly reflected on their 2012 loss not that they learned anything from it. The RNCs public reflection on their loss began right after their concession speeches. They blamed no one but themselves and in certain circles their candidate Mitt.

Glenn’s point about the DNC is that over ten days after the election the DNC (and their MSM lackeys) are still blaming everyone but themselves and anyone but their own candidate Hillary.

You’re claiming the GOP “won” this election? That the GOP’s “soul searching” is what resulted in Trump’s win…

Um, no. From the article:

One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination, and ultimately the presidency, not only ignored many of the autopsy’s core recommendations but embodied everything it warned against.

As others here and elsewhere have mentioned if Debbie Wasserman Schulz hadn’t of falsely accused Bernie of hacking the DNC “voter database” and subsequenty punitively denied Bernies campaign access to that same database (a necessary resource for any viable democratic also ran) his popular vote counts would have been ven higher in the 23 primaries that he won and and in the general election as well had he been selected as the DNC nominee.

Bernie (admittedly a creature of Washington but to most minds ever the independent rabble rousing iconoclastic firebrand) could have have run as one of two populist “anti establishment candidates” this very election cycle. There is little doubt that if the Poedesta and DNC Wikileaks emails surfaced BEFORE the beginning of the primary season Bernie would have been delivering an acceptance speech in Philadelphia.

Easy Peazy: If Bernie was our general election candidate against Donald he would only have required 38 or more electoral votes than Hillary to have sent Donald packing and here they are…

PA (Bernie won it in the Democratic Primary. Donald won it by 1.1% in the General Election) 20 Anti-Establishment Electoral College Votes

OH (Bernie won it in the Democratic Primary. Donald won it by 8.6% in the General Election) 18 Anti Establishment Electoral College Votes

And that’s the 38 rust belt votes that would have put Bernie over the top. Anti-Establishment protest votes won these two rust belt states for Bernie in the Primaries and Donald in the General. Both those rust belt states were sick of Hillary. One could make a strong case that Bernie would have won MI (10 electors) and those unequivocally Anti-Establishment Electoral College Votes in AL (3 electors) as well.

Remember the Barack Hussein Dog Whistles Hillary and Bills blew courting white lower class votes in the 2008 state primary races in Ohio and Pennsylvania? Bernie would have won these states (unlike Hillary) without dog whistles in 2016.

For those of you who cut your political teeth on Teddy White, Hunter Thomson and Noam Chomsky have fun with this

meanwhile back in 2013, the RNC’s “autopsy” calls for all kinds of change in how they relate, treat, view minorities, and while they called themselves out, there was ZERO policy changes, and only weak-sauce calls for “inclusion”. fast forward to 2016, and we can see how much that “self-criticism” was actually 100% hot air. it meant nothing, was never actually going to mean something, and was barely lip service for the sake of it. this in no way comments at all on the DNC reaction to this election. i don’t count myself part of that party and haven’t for years. they have MUCH to sift through, and clearly blaming everyone else won’t fix anything they have wrong, either. time will only tell if the few voices of reason in the DNC land on ears willing to listen, so they learn from this unmitigated disaster area of an election.

The National Democrats got hooked on the easy money that Wall street and Hollywood could provide. Easy money is better than heroin. Getting back to the roots for the Dems is going to require a lot of discomfort, some pain, sweat and vomit. That said, the road to recovery never straight. The crowd around Trump is sure to shit the bed eventually and the Dems will probably roar back without much real reform. Sanders should take a lot more shit than he is getting. He folded, and if Clinton had won, she would have buried the left of the party for another 20 years.

Sanders, sadly, misread the mood; mind you, he did’t count on Comey’s treachery, and probably tried to get Clinton to release her Goldman-Sachs speeches.
AND the grotesque stupidity of the DNC to unearth Joe McCarthy…

It’s stunning how little insight and introspection the Democrats have. They are appointing Ellison as DNC chair, apparently, and while that’s a step in the right direction, I’m guessing that the change is more cosmetic than anything else. They are notorious for resisting change.

I was stunned that the very first priority of theirs, post-election, was to arrange a meeting between the party leaders and Soros. The voters weren’t the priority, rather Soros’ opinion was the priority. That was a very telling move that speaks volumes.

What they don’t consider is that the thousands of Wikileaks e-mails from the DNC and Podesta are a permanent archive. They create a compelling image of pay-for-play, consults with billionaires, and elite, out-of-touch arrogance. Those e-mails are a case-study in corruption, and they will continue to be studied.

They will have to run against those e-mails again and again, because we can literally watch them making the same mistakes. What they don’t understand is that there is no privacy anymore. It does not exist. The only solution, for them, is to be honest and fair in their dealings.

Without massive reform and contrition, they will fail again and again, because like an addict, no one will believe their lies anymore, not until they reform.

I wouldn’t take it personally and it is my understanding the invites aren’t based on anything other that some longstanding relationships forged a long time ago back in the day under Glenn’s original blogging and at Salon. And mostly a way to stay in touch with that group who has fallen away from here for one reason or another.

That is true to an extent, but only at the outset, as we are getting started. Eventually, many who want to, can sign up and certainly Virginia Ham would be approved. The new site is for discussion of Intercept articles that has the sort of light moderation that Glenn performed when he wrote at Salon, when the comments discussion was outstanding. The site url isn’t going to be privately held for that long. But we have to get stated and settled.

And yes, I got quite strident here for a while there. I now realize I was trying to do what the management of this site has decided will not be done (I didn’t know it would never be done until very recently). The almost complete lack of moderation, coupled with the poor commenting software, had been causing this mass exodus for several years and I was very unhappy about that. But we had repeatedly been told these things would happen, and I expected they would, and was trying to staunch the bleeding of great commenters while I waited.

So, I tried to monitor for the things I remain convinced were killing the conversation here. No doubt in the process my own voice became too zealous. But, by no longer volunteering to assume that burden it feels like the weight of a Mack truck has been taken off my body.

So, I tried to monitor for the things I remain convinced were killing the conversation here. No doubt in the process my own voice became too zealous.

I believe that time will reveal to all that you are merely attempting to build an echo chamber in the effort to preserve what’s left of your tattered narcissism. Even now, in the wake of the stinging realization that your assumed value to the Intercept as a self appointed moderator and gatekeeper is deemed farcical by them, you cannot help but depict yourself as merely being an “overzealous” martyr.

Conceit is the mirrored shield of vanity; it is the perpetual mean by which all narcissists safeguard their inflated sense of self from themselves.

No one at The Intercept has said anything bad to or about me, and that’s not what happened. The new site has Glenn’s enthusiastic blessing.

Some of us started thinking about this last summer, and it just became time to finally do it. And we are.

In any event, there are quite a number of cretins commenting here who literally lie about me and utterly distort reality. You are a racist Trump voter and most definitely are one of these lying cretins. Nothing you say where I am concerned should be believed. I will not miss you, or those like you, who have taken over here.

And now, you can say what you like, because I again take my leave to work on the new thing with others.

And now, you can say what you like, because I again take my leave to work on the new thing with others.

Yes until another forty-eight hours passes and you once again feel the need to return and remind us all as to how much you are missed. I guess retweeting on twitter isn’t all that its cracked up to be. However, I suspect that Juan Thompson could use some company right about now.

A couple of things here, despite the GOP’s introspection after the 2012 election. They did the exact opposite in this election. The GOP still lost the popular vote in this election despite somehow benefiting from it. The GOP approach in winning this election is going to alienate more people and long term there are long term there are serious problems for the Republican Party. You can bask in the glory of winning this election but the Country is changing and dynamics of the Country hasn’t changed.

My issue with this is Trump said much worse things than Romney and no one cared. It may be true that the GOP was self-reflective after their loss but I are you honestly saying that Trump then embodied those changes? Unless this was a long con by the GOP, they just got incredibly lucky that a loose canon fit the mood of the country. Not to say the Dem’s don’t need to completely restructure.

I watched this charade play out, desperately hoping that Bernie would prevail, wondering how it was possible that the DNC couldn’t see the stark reality the poor and the middle class were living, finally concluding, as the electorate did, that they simply did not care, presuming the level of apathy among the great unwashed would keep them from voting, never for a second aware of the quiet anger that would be unleasbed on November 8.

They convinced themselves the wellheeled liberals were all they needed, and now the chickens are home, roosting comfortably while the know-nothings despair.

The NY Times is engaged in a scorched earth attempt to malign and castigate everything the President Elect is trying to do as he selects his staff, cabinet, etc., fomenting unrest literally in every issue.

The liberal elites need to get a grip, real soon, issue an unequivocal statement that the election is over, and pledge to work with our Republican government for the good of all of the people.

A good clue that the Democrats were on the wrong side of the people was when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s decided to stand with the GOP in Florida in opposing a law that would rein in predatory payday lending; a law the President Barack Obama backed.
That the person in control of the DNC could be so confident of the support of Democrat voters that they could pull this stunt in an election year is beyond belief.

Democrats win the popular vote even in years when they get crushed in terms of the actual governing power they win. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the peculiarities of the American electoral system give Republicans outsized advantages.

I agree that the Democrats need to change, but also think that there are structural forces that are currently holding them back. In terms of actual voter preference, they are still more popular than the Republicans.

Oh, and when the MSM say “fake news,” that includes any reporting or opinion that contradicts their centrist corporate republocratic narrative.

Who gave the MSM the right to be judge, jury and executioner of what constitutes “fake news”? All the MSM does is put out fake news. The MSM aficionado of fake news. The MSM out the fake news that Hillary Clinton was 98% likely to win the presidency. The MSM printed out and shipped copies of Newsweek celebrating “Madam President.” The sam MSM put out fake, rigged polls that were proven spectacularly wrong. The MSM create fake narratives like Trump being responsible for violence at his own rallies when it was DNC-funded agitators all along. The MSM ARE THE FUCKING EXPERTS of fake news.

I’m a great admirer of your work, and while I agree with many of your critiques the Democratic party, I disagree with the contrast you’ve illustrated in the central thesis of your article.

It is of course true that the Republican Party ran an autopsy on 2012, but their winning the White House has almost nothing to do with any effort from that same Republican establishment. Both parties had populist candidates in their initial field, and both party establishments wanted suppression of those candidates. I think the key difference in how things played out on each side simply lies in the scope of each field. The Republican field was so vast that Donald Trump was able to take a lead just by making inflammatory comments that brought him early attention and momentum. Whereas Bernie and Hillary was basically 1vs1 the entire time which gave Clinton all kinds of strategic leverage.

Because of the closeness of the Democratic Primary, there was enough grey area to invite sabotage of Bernie’s campaign. Similar attempts at sabotage came from the RNC and establishment, but by then Trump simply had too much runaway momentum.

I don’t think the RNC got smarter, they were dragged kicking and screaming into a Trump presidency, and again while I absolutely agree with your critiques of the Democratic Party, I disagree with your particular analysis of the situation.

Also, while I’m in no way anywhere close to influential in the DNC, and I’m not prithee to what kind of discussions are happening at that level, I will say that the ground level Democrats that I’m in proximity with are absolutely having a sobering discussion about how and why Trump won. I’ve talked to non-voters, third-party voters, Democrats in shock, and even Trump supporters, and I see a lot of common disbelief that this is now where we’re actually at.

I hope to see a lot of people from all over the political spectrum forming a consensus populist direction that can reach common folks from all different walks of life. And to that sentiment, I will be watching the DNC just as closely as the Trump White House.

Less than two weeks after a shocking election, when the DNC had not yet elected a new chair, Mr. Greenwald is telling us about a “The Stark Contrast Between GOP’s Self-Criticism in 2012 and Democrats’ Blame-Everyone-Else Posture Now”, a “Self-Criticism” that came far later than a couple of weeks after the 2012 election, was targeting the question of how to win elections in the future rather than the electoral loss, and that Mr. Greenwald himself say Trump’s victory had nothing to do with.

The GOP report, which seem to have been announced in December, 2012, was published sometime in March, 2013, five months after the November 6, 2012, election, focused primarily on how to regain power rather than on analyzing the 2012 loss. Here is its first paragraph:

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus announced the Growth and Opportunity Project. As the co-chairs of the project, we were charged with making recommendations and assisting in putting together a plan to grow the Party and improve Republican campaigns. We were asked to dig deep to provide an honest review of the 2012 election cycle and a path forward for the Republican Party to ensure success in winning more elections.

While that quote does express a will “to dig deep to provide an honest review of the 2012”, the Table of Contents mentions no such review. Here are some of the subjects it delves into: Messaging, Friends and Allies, Campaign Finance, and so on. Check it for yourselves: The Growth and Opportunity Project

About halfway through, Mr. Greenwald says the following:

One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination, and ultimately the presidency, not only ignored many of the autopsy’s core recommendations but embodied everything it warned against. Nonetheless, the reaction of Republican officials after 2012 was to accept responsibility for their loss, admit their own fundamental errors, and vow to fix what was wrong with themselves

Ironic or horrifying, it essentially renders the GOP report a meaningless, posturing, pompous waste of time and money, which Republicans themselves paid no heed to, and which had nothing to do with anything but pampering their bruised egos. Why, oh why, should the Democrats wallow in such useless trifles? More to the point, why does Mr Greenwald pivot an article around a report which he himself admits is of no real value at all?

Vicarious Reinforcement is a learning process that was hypothesized in Social Learning Theory. It refers to the process of learning behaviors through observation of reward and punishment, rather than through direct experience. For example, children who have grown up with older brothers and sisters often learn about behavior and expectations through watching their siblings. When they see their sibling get rewarded for a certain action, they learn that they should also do the behavior.

You must be talking to the wrong people . . . I’ve heard plenty of Democrat self-criticism, especially from people to the left of Clinton (like Sanders supporters) and also from people who just weren’t thrilled with Clinton but voted for her anyway. Unfortunately, there was more than the usual amount of gross over-characterization of opponents in this election campaign (by both sides) . . . this article is just another example.

That the DNC backed Clinton instead of Sanders makes perfect sense to me. Of course they went with a centrist with Trump on the other side. At the time it seemed like a winning argument to move to the center to attract more conservative voters. Turned out to be wrong.

Also I think we should have the DNC weigh in on a favorite candidate. With weak party influence you end up with a candidate like Trump.

That the DNC backed Clinton instead of Sanders makes perfect sense to me. Of course they went with a centrist with Trump on the other side. At the time it seemed like a winning argument to move to the center to attract more conservative voters.

Even at the time it was obvious that voters were rebellious. It made more sense to put your rebel against their rebel. The establishment wanted the power; that is why they went with Hillary.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the main point of any campaign to try and put someone in office that the politicos will like, but still has the voice of the public behind them? Hillary won the popular vote in the US, but Sanders won the popular vote in the primaries. If the DNC had kept their minds on their constituents instead of their bank accounts, they may very well have won the election instead of putting a dislike-able individual such as Clinton at the head of their party.

Democrats need to accept their own responsibility and blame, and stop pretending that they were just the victims of other people’s failures and bad acts.

Yes, there is a lot of denial circulating in the wake of an establishment politician losing to a bombastic narcissist whose very lack of traditional qualifications for the job were considered an asset by those who handed him a victory. Over the last year, we watched as Donald trump employed a strategy of speaking to the right’s long simmering frustration with the self-serving nature of Identity Liberalism. For decades, the nativist sensibilities of America’s majority demographic has been relentlessly assailed by deeply offensive proponents of identity politics in an effort undermine that which is commonly referred to as their collective sense of “exceptionalism” (AKA “cultural bias” and/or “national identity”). To this end, an escalating pattern of deconstructionism and historical revision has emerged (largely from academia) with the intention of preparing the intellectual milieu in which the poisonous fruits of Identity Liberalism could take root and flourish. One would be mistaken, however, if one were to limit the scope of this pattern to the United States, or even the West, alone. This intellectual exercise in top-down manipulation of nativist attitudes and national identities is in keeping with the Neoliberal aim of undermining the sovereign interests of the individual and, by extension, those of nation states across the globe.

It has long been understood by neoliberal academics that the aim of creating a unified global economy can only be successful if the world’s nation states are playing by the same set of rules. For example, Islamic prohibitions against usury (Riba), have long been a bone of contention between many Muslim controlled Nation States and those of the west. Likewise, conflicting cultural attitudes concerning sex, race, gender, religion, and politics has made the creation and cross-cultural assimilation of a global labor pool of highly mobile, migrant workers problematic. And then there is the problem of regional political instability (inter- and intra-state conflict) interfering with the flow of transnational capital and raw materials. A focus on the transnational construction of energy pipelines alone can provide a degree of insight into the problem of attracting foreign investment and the perceived need for nation building under the guise of a global war on terror.

In consideration of the foregoing, one might be wise to ask:

1. Is Donald Trump truly standing in opposition to this deeply entrenched pattern of globalization and the doctrine of political, economic, and social homogenization that accompanies it?

2. What reasons has Trump given for his opposition to immigration? Is it terror, crime, or domestic unemployment that most concerns him? He has had no problem exploiting migrant labor as a business man.

3. Why emphasize the rebuilding of America’s “defense” infrastructure when longstanding, legally binding constraints prevent it? Why is Trump calling for an increase in defense spending if a shift toward non-interventionist policies is his true intention?

4. Is Islamist militancy and illegal immigration so out of control in this country that we need further growth and integration of national security and law enforcement agencies? Or is his emphasis on the enhancement of law enforcement capabilities driven by the understanding that the inevitable drive toward globalization will lead to the further disillusionmant of his political base to a decree that could finally culminate in widespread violent unrest?

5. Is Trump’s overt pro-Israeli posture any indication that he truly intends to back away from decades of American foreign policy in which America’s staunchest Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, has succeeded in harnessing pan-Arab aspirations with an eye to facilitating the integration of sharia based economics with that of the West? Does he truly intend to exacerbate the Israel/Palestinian conflict by relocating the American embassy to Jerusalem and/or openly allowing for the further spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank? Or will Trump continue to remind the Israelis of the benefits that have already been derived from its patience and covert support for nation building in the region?

Is there anyone who does not understand that the pairing of Pence with Trump was intended to be the mean by which the longstanding, geopolitical goals of the deep state remain on track?

Pence will not be occupying a position wherein he can simply be replaced at will.

1. Pence has publicly acknowledged that Dick Cheney was his role model for VP.

2. Pence Scored 62% in the New American magazine’s Freedom Index, which scores lawmakers based on their fidelity to the U.S. Constitution they swear to uphold.

3. While serving in the House of representatives, Pense repeatedly backed proposals to “to unconstitutionally surrender the power of Congress to declare war” to the POTUS – wheteher they be republican or democrat.

4. When actively searching for a running mate, Trump indicated that he was looking for a “chief operating officer.” As CEO, VP Pence would be charged with overseeing the ongoing operations of the executive branch while Trump would assume the role as its titular head (front man).

5. Pence was chosen to head trump’s transition team. which is stacked to-a-man with devout Zionists. The presidential transition team is tasked with facilitating the transfer of power from one administration to the next in a manner that consciously minimizes the potential for leadership vacuum. Pence will have a central role in selecting members of the next administration

6. Pence is an unwavering advocate of free trade agreements

7. Pence is in favor of forced migration of Muslims from war torn countries including Syria.

8. Pence is an outspoken proponent of using regime change as a tool of American foreign policy

9. Pence has vowed that “when Donald Trump becomes president of the United States of America, we’re going to rip up the Iran deal!” This hawkish view toward Iran is dramatic alignment with Israel’s hawkish leadership who have long favored military solutions to Iran’s perceived “existential threat.” Former US Ambassador John Bolton shares Pence’s views on Iran and is thus favored by him for Secretary of State.

10. Pense was instrumental in creating a narrative around the 911 WTC attacks that was intended to recast CIA/Saudi asset, Osama bin Laden, into the role of the cave dwelling mastermind behind the 911 attacks. A week after Presedent Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom, Pense claimed that bin Laden’s alleged complicity “makes it very clear that his ultimate objective is to destabilize the Saudi Arabian government.” Given that we now know that the Saudis played a central role in the attacks, Pence’s opportunistic fictions speaks to the degree to which he was committed to seeing preemptive regime change (Bush Doctrine) become a realpolitik mechanism of US foreign policy. In 2007, however, Pence was openly expressing his concern that the Saudis were failing to regulate Saudi based charities that were allegedly tied to funding terrorism; that concern was expressed during a debate on proposed weapons sales to the Saudis which included precision-guided weapons. Although the sales were intended to facilitate a fledgling American-Israeli-Sunni alliance at that time, the Israeli government openly expressed its opposition with the intention of further leveraging its own “qualitative military edge.”

“Why is Trump calling for an increase in defense spending if a shift toward non-interventionist policies is his true intention?”

For the same reason that muggers choose weak targets instead of strong targets. Being strong does not mean that you are looking for a fight but if someone should bring one to you, you intend to prevail.

In principle, I agree with your comment. However, when the bulk of the defense budget is currently being used to violently impose preemptive regime change on sovereign nations (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen) at the expense of democratic principles, then the term “defense spending” must be questioned.

The Republicans did indeed publish a report, and then totally ignored it. This lead to Trump as president. The Democrats have gone one better. They ran a totally dishonest campaign, collaborated under the table with their chosen candidate to dispose of Bernie Sanders, collaborated with the MSM to attack their opponent, and now want to blame everyone but themselves for the outcome. The Democrat establishment selected a corrupt, principle-less candidate, and controlled the whole process to the best of their ability. NEITHER PARTY recognized the wishes of the people to end the corruption and micro-management of government. Government, whether Left or Right doesn’t give a damn about the citizens, only about their control of the citizens to ensure their personal and Party power.

Unfortanetly the DNC elites and MSM collaborated amongst themselves to secure Hillary’s spot as the Democrats nominee, well before Sanders was in the picture. Her nomination was secured back in 2008 after she lost the position to Obama. Everyone knew it, which is why there was a lack of reasonable candidates on the Democratic ticket. Mark O’Malley was a disaster, the Democrats version of Dick Cheney. Sanders wasn’t even that strong of a candidate in my opinion. The Democrats could have groomed much better candidates if the DNC didn’t treat Hillary like royalty and hand her the nomination 8 years in advance! Another problem that this created was that it prevented debate on true issues which would have allowed the candidates who’s message best resonated with voters from becoming the presidential nominee. This lack of lack of reasonable debate gave Trump an edge, as it did in the Rebulican primaries. With issues issues of perpetual war and globalization at least he talked about theses issues, even if he was disingenuous.

This in addition to plain hubris, in which many people including myself, thought Hillary couldn’t loose to Trump.

Mr. Greenwald, I think, gets it partially right. The fact that Hilary won the popular vote by 2 million+ clearly signals that even a weak, establishment campaign like hers resonates with a majority of the voting public. Dig one layer deeper and I think it’s fair to point out that the electoral and state govt. map shows that Dems have been soundly outmaneuvered for decades by the Republican state and local level strategy. They have masterfully used gerrymandering to take control of many battleground states and to heavily tilt the table in their favor in (already) red states. They also have systematically tried to disenfranchise liberal Democratic voters as much as possible. In North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and many other states, they’ve tried a number of tactics: purging voter roles, limiting access via ID laws, restricting early voting, shortening hours reducing polling places in Dem. areas, etc. They created this ground plan at least 25 years ago and have executed it to great success.

I agree with Mr. Greenwald that the Democratic Party needs to take a long hard look in the mirror to address failures in this election, but beyond this, they desperately need to wake up and aggressively and unceasingly counter the Republican state and local strategies. Unless and until they do, I fear that we will continue to see a series of Bush vs. Gore and Clinton vs. Trump outcomes as well as continued Republican dominance of state houses, governerships and Congress.

[[[ The fact that Hilary won the popular vote by 2 million+ clearly signals that even a weak, establishment campaign like hers resonates with a majority of the voting public. ]]]

Those numbers are bogus. The vote counting stopped after she knew she had no chance of pulling off a coup and conceded. In fact, I think she and her ilk got caught with their hands in the cookie jar… prompting her concession and sending Podesta the Molesta out to dismiss the brainwashed cult members.

MSM and others wanted to “throw the psychopath a bone” to make her feel better about her scummy self …

AND …. to justify sending more brainwashed cult members out into the streets to riot and burn America to the ground like:
1) Hitler did in 1945 — in the face of Allied Conquest.
2) Saddam Hussein lighting all the oil fires across Iraq.

a party that is so braindead as to appoint a radical terrorist fracker as chief of staff, a criminal mind to run the campaign, engage in criminal money laudering in a pay for play scheme, is not a party, IT IS ORGANISED CRIME.

Yes its the Democratic partys fault that white supremacists, evangelicals ,and the FBI,Putin and Julian Assange conspired to defeat a woman.Whats the title of your next article ” Why the Jews should have worked with Hitler” or how about “Armenians for Turkey’?

Many seem to forget that the place in this discussion is USA, where a putrid system of corruption, injustice and greed is the norm. When going through US history without rose-tinted glasses, one will see arguably one of the most rotten societies of all. Just that the down-trodden never had a voice. Bit like England, just worse. And they are not unique, just that their self-rightousness seems boundless.

The MSM and the Dem establishment are staying mum about the exit poll evidence pointing to electronic rigging of the election for Trump. Please let The Intercept break this story that has been suppressed since Kerry/Bush 2004. The “red shift” in computerized election results that Jonathan Simon documents in his book “Code Red: Computerized Vote Theft and the New American Century” has been distorting the electoral landscape ever since. Obama’s high turnouts overcame the algorithm; Hillary’s couldn’t.

Jonathan Simon’s Facebook page, Code Red 2016, is a good place to start. Brad Friedman interviewed him on 11/17. The discussion starts with similar exit poll findings by Theodore de M Soares at 28 minutes: http://bradblog.com/?p=11931

Will the democratic establishment take on issues like perpetual warfare, the erosions of civil liberties, the rise of an oligarchy class, the destruction of local economies to enhance Wall Streets global profit matrix, the disenchantment of voters, and an economic system hinged on maximal growth for a few vs sustainability for the rest? I believe that some Democrat politicians are aware of these issues and willing to address them. Yet establishment politicians like Shumer will not address any of these issues and will resist an insurgency within the party which is necessary to address them and bring the party back in touch with voters.

Dems and many commenters are still stuck in #1and#2 above blaming Greenwald. But consider this:

1. Why are you not angry at HRC? After all, the news stories that circulated were of her own doing. She was to blame for creating the stories with her own behavior.
2. The same is exactly true for the leaders of the DNC. It was they who rigged an election for her and thereby giving Truth to at least one widely held claim by Trump.
3. Her bad message. Calling 50% of the nation ‘racists’ isn’t really a good way of getting people to vote for your campaign. Also having an economic plan that enriches the very people that caused real economic hardship felt in the rust belt is like rubbing salt in the wound, isn’t it?

So, get over it. Get past denial and anger and at least get to Bargaining. Then perhaps you can have an honest conversation about how to handle the next midterm elections because the clock is ticking as of now.

Because unlike the rest of citizens of Dumbshitopia, Clinton is the one person besides myself that I’m certain didn’t vote for this fascist spokesman for white privilege.

And if that isn’t good enough a reason for you, give it a month. Or maybe two. It will get better as a reason as more and more people claim they didn’t vote for Trump … they just voted against Clinton.

Even as people not affiliated with this party of racists and undead capitalists swagger through the American bazaar overturning every bit of decency on display like a mob of droogs led by Alex Delarge at a Macys white sale, more and more people will say, “I didn’t vote for him.”

Eventually even the people who voted for him will have to admit that Donald Trump and his band of alt-right misfits shouldn’t hold public office.

When we who didn’t vote for him say, “toldya so,” will you beg our forgiveness or simply drool as if stunned — or will those of you who remain committed to the cause comment pleasantly on his spiffy new uniforms design for the Trump Youth Brigades?

So I’ll ask the question now as Jeff Session pulls his dusty confederate flag out of his closet, “Why aren’t you mad at yourselves for voting for Trump?”

The worst of using Kuhbler Ross to indict vocal opponents isn’t in the ignorance they reveal. The worst of it is in the misunderstanding about democracy and an election they reveal. An election isn’t a death (as KR was observing), it’s the exact opposite of a death; it’s about a birth, a new beginning. An election isn’t about the past (though those attacking HRC and the DNC won’t admit it.) An election is about the future.

Those of you who think to demean those of us who supported Clinton, congratulations.

Metaphorically speaking, the Kubler Ross theory need not necessarily apply to death, per se, but can be used in the context of a traumatic loss or defeat. Undoubtedly to many, Hillary’s loss in the election was very traumatic and disillusioning. Also, as I have recalled from a psychology course in college, the stages of grief can deviate, and does not always follow linearly from #1 through #5 – some stages may repeat. This is definitely not the example I myself would have used, and I can understand why the invoking of the stages of grief was upsetting to you.

I do not seek vengeance on Hillary’s supporters, but I am nonetheless very upset at how Hillary and Co. did manage to rig the primaries process.

“…….Because unlike the rest of citizens of Dumbshitopia, Clinton is the one person besides myself that I’m certain didn’t vote for this fascist spokesman for white privilege……”

If using Kuhbler Ross to describe democrats after this election is a little over the top, then describing the people who voted for Trump as dumbshits is far worse (and idiotic). Indeed, Milton, calling Trump a fascists for “white privilege” just shows your own level of ignorance for why people voted for Trump – and in particular – against Hillary.

“…….Already you’re trying to say you didn’t vote for Trump but instead you voted against Hillary?……”

Nice change of subject Milton. I didn’t vote for either one, but as a Republican, I would never have voted for the corrupt, bankster Hillary. No matter what Trump does or doesn’t do in the future, that doesn’t change your ignorant statement calling people who voted for Trump “dumbshits” – or that (white privileged) people should vote someone else’s interests. Or are they just too dumb to realize that jobs which sustained generations no longer exist?

When people are marginalized, they will ways to voice discontent. In Europe, far right parties continue to grow because the elite left chooses to ignore them. I don’t support Trump, but calling people (even white privileged ones) “dumbshits” and “deplorables” is bound to cause some kind of revolt.

Well, when I find myself agreeing with Craig, the worm has really turned. You can come back here whenever you want, but I can assure you you’re gonna get the same answer you’re getting now. You have the same condescending attitude that so many Clinton backers have, and you don’t even see it, or the irony in your delusion. I’m a leftist, and I don’t for Republicans, Neo -liberals, rightists, or fascists, neo-cons, etc. Clinton is a Neo-liberal, and has strong Neo-conservative tendencies. I’m not gonna vote for Clinton under any circumstances. You want to overlook Clinton’s major malfunctions? Fine, Don’t ask me to, cause I ain’t gonna. I’m not playing your destructive little game. You self-righteous fools in the Democratic Party torpedoed Sanders and then lied about it, and then hectored, endlessly, his very enthusiastic supporters about what dummies and fools they were to not see how great Clinton was. Really, really stupid, brother. And now, you’re still at it! Incredible, but at least you’re not alone. Good luck in the coming months and years, and be sure to come back here in six months so you can experience the abuse again. I’m guessing there is still gonna be an internet, so take heart.

Thanks to sane economic policies (despite Republican’s obstruction) the US economy is not nearly as blighted as Germany’s in the 1930s. And despite the bluster about rounding up 11 million “illegal immigrants,” I doubt Trump will be allowed to establish his deportation force. And further, I doubt most Americans will approve of the sort of white nationalism Trump’s embrace of the alt-right and Breitbart conservatism. You saw fast he ditched Paul Manafort when Manafort’s business ties with Russia were exposed.

People aren’t as desperate now as the Germans in the 1930s. Remember, a majority of Americans voted against Trump.

Finally, Trump is an idiot. He will overplay his hand. A greater danger than Trump will be his barrelful of racist clowns (like Jeff Sessions or Steve Bannon) who want to exploit this bit of misfortune we Americans must endure.

I’m not afraid, but I’ll be praying for those American minorities who Trump scapegoated to win this election. Promises have consequences.

The stories that were circulated were of her own doing? Really,even the countless false ones?
The election was rigged? Didn’t she receive more votes than Sanders?
She didn’t call 50% of his supporters racists.
No bargaining with Fascists.

She, and apparently you too, believe a vote for Trump means you’re a racist.

Again you’re an illiterate trying to read my mind. It’s like a cat trying to bark. You simply lack the ability.

I don’t think everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. I do think some people who voted for Trump are racists. (See David Duke for instance.)

I know that Trump exploited racial resentment and xenophobia to get himself elected. Why? Because that is what he said. I heard him say stuff like Mexicans are rapists and that Obama wasn’t a legitimate president because he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii and I heard him say he was going to put a ban on Muslims.

Many of the people who voted for Trump aren’t racist. Some are idiots.

Do you understand the difference between the word ALL and the word SOME?

The WikiLeaks emails releases validated the suspicions of many (esp. Bernie’s supporters) that the Democratic party rigged the primaries process in favor of Hillary. Closed primaries, courting all the liberal media to endorse her before/during the primaries, purging voters from the voter rolls, having the party affiliations of voters changed (my father’s party affiliation was changed, and he couldn’t vote in the Democrat primary), engaging in blatant lies and obfuscation, and having superdelegates heavily favor their chosen candidate, to brainwash many into thinking that the primary process was a done deal (which has a butterfly effect’s set of implications in suppressing voter turnout).

Also, while Hillary and her surrogates didn’t outright call Sanders supporters fascists, they did effectively do so towards Trump supporters, calling them a “basket of deplorables” among other things. Even if someone doesn’t say something in particular explicitly, what really matters is what kind of message is being received by the other side, and how that message is interpreted. To this end, it was very clear that many voters (including Sanders’ supporters during and after the primaries process) were turned off by the hostile and patronizing (tone of the) rhetoric launched by Hillary and her surrogates. If one party wants an entire group of people to change (a bloc of the American public), being hostile and instigatory towards them will not only not help, but will backfire – this is rooted in psychology.

[[[ If one party wants an entire group of people to change (a bloc of the American public), being hostile and instigatory towards them will not only not help, but will backfire – this is rooted in psychology.]]]

WRONG. Fundamental Values does not equal “psychology.”

That’s the heart of the problem. “Psychology” is “Manipulation.”

Don’t try to manipulate someone’s emotions. When you do, Fundamental Values kick into high gear.

And, if you lie (lie lie lie lie), about your ‘fundamental values’ to get elected, you should expect a retaliation like the backlash against Nicolae Ceau?escu.

You took my point WAY out of context. We need not partake in the wholesale demonization of psychology.

Is it not true that when two sides debate against each other, and become more hostile and antagonistic towards each other, that they grow further and further apart? Yes, Hillary and Co. (and others) did partake in the manipulation of the public as a means to an end, and that is a case in which psychology was intentionally used for nefarious purposes. But they were blind to the totality of psychological effects and consequences, that their hostile campaign would have in the end.

Psychology, by itself, is not something to disparage. It must be discussed in a proper context, as specific or as general as is necessary. Psychology will always exist, so long as there are humans and cognitive beings. BUT, using psychology for unethical ulterior motives – that is what I am opposed to.

[[[ Psychology, by itself, is not something to disparage. It must be discussed in a proper context, as specific or as general as is necessary. Psychology will always exist, so long as there are humans and cognitive beings. BUT, using psychology for unethical ulterior motives – that is what I am opposed to.]]]

Psychology only exists between your ears. Politics is BEYOND SATURATED with psychologists. Manipulation is the norm.

Manipulation is the domain of both sociopaths and psychopaths. They are now occupying the most influential positions in the global community. And, always unethical.

There’s a difference between Honest Persuasion vs Dishonest Manipulation. And, in the progression over time and human history, the Manipulator always loses.

It’s like in the world of dating… when you find yourself saddled with a manipulator… shit happens.

No disagreement here – psychology rests within the realm and domain of the mind. The lying and manipulation that has occurred leading up to, and within this election cycle, is beyond comprehension. The same could be said for other election cycles, but the patterns of deception and manipulation were more apparent this time (thanks, in part, to leaked emails).

As the old adage goes, “the truth shall set you free” – the solution lies in restoring the principle that is based on the golden rule (do unto others…), and doing so with integrity. We are a very long ways off, as a people, from recognizing this – but I’m hopeful that enough people see this to bring about the necessary changes (hopefully in my lifetime)

As soon as I saw the people he chose as his appointees, I realized that the possibility of Trump orchestrating a con job is pretty much a given (though I had strongly considered this even beforehand). I can only hope that the opposition to injustices about to be committed by him is enough to stave off imminent destruction

As others here and elsewhere have mentioned if Debbie Wasserman Schulz hadn’t of falsely accused Bernie of hacking the DNC “voter database” and subsequenty punitively denied Bernies campaign access to that same database (a necessary resource for any viable democratic also ran) his popular vote counts would have been ven higher in the 23 primaries that he won and and in the general election as well had he been selected as the DNC nominee.

Bernie (admittedly a creature of Washington but to most minds ever the independent rabble rousing iconoclastic firebrand) could have have run as one of two populist “anti establishment candidates” this very election cycle. There is little doubt that if the Poedesta and DNC Wikileaks emails surfaced BEFORE the beginning of the primary season Bernie would have been delivering an acceptance speech in Philadelphia.

Easy Peazy: If Bernie was our general election candidate against Donald he would only have required 38 or more electoral votes than Hillary to have sent Donald packing and here they are…

PA (Bernie won it in the Democratic Primary. Donald won it by 1.1% in the General Election) 20 Anti-Establishment Electoral College Votes

OH (Bernie won it in the Democratic Primary. Donald won it by 8.6% in the General Election) 18 Anti Establishment Electoral College Votes

And that’s the 38 rust belt votes that would have put Bernie over the top. Anti-Establishment protest votes won these two rust belt states for Bernie in the Primaries and Donald in the General. Both those rust belt states were sick of Hillary. One could make a strong case that Bernie would have won MI (10 electors) and those unequivocally Anti-Establishment Electoral College Votes in AL (3 electors) as well.

Remember the Barack Hussein Dog Whistles Hillary and Bills blew courting white lower class votes in the 2008 state primary races in Ohio and Pennsylvania? Bernie would have won these states (unlike Hillary) without dog whistles in 2016.

“……..One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination, and ultimately the presidency, not only ignored many of the autopsy’s core recommendations but embodied everything it warned against…….”

You completely undermined the whole idea of your article with this perfectly correct summary. If anything the Democratic Party needs to become more racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and corrupt – and support photo-ops with Putin on RT. The Trump Administration together with Russia will become a glowing example to the world how two world powers can work together to ensure the worst dictators in the world stay in power. Indeed, Trump just settled a lawsuit for $25 million out of court. This will be the most corrupt administration in US history – bar none. The Democratic Party connections to Wall Street and the banks just wasn’t enough. They need to become worse. That’s what the Democratic Party learned from this election.

The most amazing part is that Trump isn’t really a conservative. His first act as President could be to enact a government-funded jobs program. General Flynn is a life long Democrat. Trump admires Putin. Jesus, the world has been turned upside down.

Of course, it didn’t matter who won the election to the Intercept. They would have published many of the same articles with the name Hillary replacing Trump – especially concerning insiders, lobbying etc.

Mr. Greenwald has a deep love for the Democratic party establishment and they should heed his warning if they want to maintain the levers of power.

The Republican establishment didn’t heed the lessons of 2008 and 2012 and their own base turned against them. Now the Republican establishment must kneel to President Trump and so their victory is a hollow one.

The Democrats should win in 2020, but the question is whether the base will rise up and anoint an insurgency candidate. Mr. Greenwald wisely wishes to forestall such a rebellion within the ranks, and is merely warning the Democratic leadership to make some nominal concessions to their membership in order to retain power. As usual, Cassandra will be ignored, and history will repeat itself.

There are only two big tents to choose from. Choose your corruption – or is that ignore your corruption! Hillary was a very bad candidate. However, I must confess that I never foresaw her losing to any Republican.

“……..One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination, and ultimately the presidency, not only ignored many of the autopsy’s core recommendations but embodied everything it warned against…….”

You completely undermined the whole idea of your article with this perfectly correct summary.

He did not. The point of the article was in comparing the responses of both parties to their respective defeats. The Democratic party is continuing to wallow in or masquerade its ignorance. The first step in addressing a problem, or problems, is to admit that there is one – to this end, the Democratic party has failed to admit that their establishment machinery is, itself, the problem. In one way, this situation is analogous to someone refusing to cut off a gangrenous limb, thinking the problem itself will go away… but it’ll only spread and get worse, until the host dies.

In sum, it’s the lack of introspection on the part of the Democratic establishment, or the lack of even trying to warrant a review and examination of its own problems. When an exclusive group of elites (who seem to think they’re ne’er-do-wrongs) are so confident in their air of self-righteousness to the point of being arrogant and conceited, bad things happen.

I appreciate your response, and I agree that there should be (and will be) some self-introspection after the election loss by the Democrats. I also agree that this was an anti-establishment/anti-globalization vote – and that is the message for this year’s election. The Democrats nominated an entitled insider as their representative while Trump is an outsider although every bit as corrupt as any insider. However, the Republican establishment opposed Trump every step of the way as well – except at the very beginning of the nominating process because they didn’t take Trump seriously. So the Republican establishment was every bit as big of a problem as the Democratic establishment. They just won the election – barely. The 2012 Republican summary message never discussed “the establishment” as being the problem. In fact, bringing more people under the Republican big tent was the conclusion i.e., more diversity. Trump preached the exact opposite.

Self-introspection by the Republicans had nothing to do with the Trump victory. Had Trump followed the advice of Republican leadership, he wouldn’t even have been nominated. Greenwald would have been better off to leave this out of the article. The conclusion from the Republican “self-introspection” is that it did no good.

Regardless of outcome, on the part of both parties, it’s the thought and admission of one’s own wrongs and/or weaknesses that counts, respective to the article’s premise. But such processes of self-examination and drafting resolutions to problems, and executing on that, don’t always result in the desired outcome. (In some cases, the same mistakes are repeated.)

You argue the half-wit talk radio way, by the assembly or irrational, illogical groupings: “Democrats have spent the last 10 days flailing around blaming everyone except for themselves, constructing a carousel of villains and scapegoats – from Julian Assange, Vladimir Putin, James Comey, the electoral college, “fake news,” and Facebook, to Susan Sarandon, Jill Stein, millennials, Bernie Sanders, Clinton-critical journalists and, most of all, insubordinate voters themselves…”

No. A few people have commented on each of those things — and it is indisputable that each of those things had some adverse effect on Democrats in the election.

No “The Democrats” say that any or all of those things accounts for Hillary’s loss in the Electoral College. You’re just steaming hysterically to suggest anything of the sort.

It is obvious that many different Democrats made many different mistakes. The whole defeat is made more graceless, indeed rancid, by the triumphalist superiority so many people showed in the days and weeks before.

hashtags win elections? I don’t think so. the Democrats are staring at 30 very dark years if they don’t get circumspect instantly. the Republicans did the autopsy, as Glenn writes, but didn’t implement policy changes to attract women and minority voters. what they did do is double-down on voter suppression and voter “fraud” fake stories and allowed a buffoon to win the primary. not to mention the red state strategy financed by billionaires with no ideology except obscene profit, zero regulation, and privatization of everything. will the Democrats now embark on a blue state strategy that reflects America rather than Wall Street? it’ll be hard to do with Schumer in charge. we can always hope.

The problem is Democrats would control both the House and the Presidency if we were on a popular vote system. Gerrymandering makes it very difficult to win seats in the HoR and twice since 2000 the Democratic nominee won the popular vote but not the office.

As of the time of writing, the comment I posted at 4:54 am EST isn’t showing up here. It’s been more than an hour now. This is ridiculous, especially after the thoughtfulness and work that went into it.

“David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, said that Clinton was a ‘one hundred per cent’ lock and advised nervous Democrats to stop ‘wetting the bed,’”

This reminds me exactly of the debacle that Karl Rove (co-founder of American Crossroads PAC) created back in 2012 with FOX News, when the state of Ohio was called prematurely and a bunch of angry callers phoned FOX News afterwards. Karl Rove assured fellow Republican supporters that Romney would win, but the results went the other way.

***

This article basically said exactly what I have been saying all this time. The “Democratic” establishment is so tone-deaf, and so far removed from everyday American people, that they are blinded by a false sense of entitlement (as was mentioned) and moral superiority. Rarely in my life have I seen such a conglomeration of prudes, as was seen with establishment Democrats, particularly in the media (but the politicians, too).

On average, I do tend to agree with Democrats more often than with Republicans on stated viewpoints (I base my views on principle, and not party affiliation – this is called Independent thinking, ironically enough) , but the Democrats have clearly not practiced [enough of] what they preach. I think Hillary’s talk of “public positions” and “private positions” really speaks to the current state of the soul of the Democratic party establishment. Say one thing, pretend to do it, but secretly do something else. If there’s one thing I can credit the Republicans with, it’s the fact that they’re more transparent (though they have an extensive history of cover-ups, too, as was the case with the Iraq War).

The one very important thing that separates radical liberals from radical conservatives, at least in the US: the former are sensitive and easily offended by everything, the latter are insensitive to the point of being offensive. The problem lies in the polarization and radicalization within both parties. This kills off informed reasoning and sanity checks on shaping one’s perspective.

I entirely agree with Mr. Greenwald that “Democrats need to accept their own responsibility and blame”. However painful it may be, they should face the reality that they needed a better campaign hashtag. Hopefully, Mrs. Clinton will realize this and start working on her hashtag for 2020. By that time, even the dimmest of Mr. Trump’s supporters will have figured out that he is a fraud and, coupled with a better hashtag, the future of the Democrats appears bright.

Usually, I would demand a six figure fee for imparting this advice. But since I’m feeling magnanimous, here it is. A campaign needs a memorable Twitter hashtag. #MAGA was short and simple, while #ImWithHer was twice as long and much harder to type. It couldn’t really be shortened to #IWH without confusing many people.

The election was close and Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, and a better hashtag would have put her over the top.

I seriously doubt that Hillary Clinton has a serious chance at the presidency in the future, let alone the Democratic nomination for the presidency, after this debacle. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

My biggest issue with the “I’m With Her” slogan/hashtag is the suggestion (whether intentional or not) that the prospects of electing our first female president, ought to be the reason why Hillary Clinton should become president. Gender inequality means that one ought to receive the same credit for their work, regardless of their sex – ergo, voting for Hillary just because she’s a woman is also sexist.

The Democrats basically have to, at some point. At the very least, I would think that they would consider the definition of insanity (doing something wrong again, expecting a different or better result)

With what is at stake in each presidential election, repeating the same series of events again and inducing Hillary’s nomination for another presidential bid would be a fatal and catastrophic mistake. I could see them trying to boost another establishment candidate (e.g. Chuck Schumer), but certainly not the same one.

But, of course – there’s always that possibility that I could be wrong.

#HashTags are a dime a dozen, benitoe. There’s no money in it. .. It don’t take a Trump #U grad to come up with a hash tag.

Truth is, I don’t care if the “Democrats need to accept their own responsibility and blame.” Good riddance and adios.

According to Glenn (who may be losing his mind.), the Republicans looked deep within their soul and came up with … Trump! No, that’s not right. Trump looked deep within their soul and came up with … Trump.

Anyway you cut it, it comes up Trump.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive …

Wut? Are you talking about the same Clinton Campaign? (This article is from the 2008 campaign, but I doubt she spent any less in 2016).

“We all know that these guys [campaign consultants] are making this much money,” said Democratic election lawyer Leslie Kerman. “You can tell by the houses they buy and the vacation homes. They’re all talkers. They don’t talk about how much money they make, but they talk about what they buy with all the money they make.”

#$ is better. You still have to press three keys because of the but it offers one size fits all demographic messaging with several triangulating layers of political meaning for buyers, sellers, and the self-betrayed. When the #MAGA set figures out they were fooled for the Nth time again they will be looking for something less complicated too.

I adopt what Clark has said about the false distinction between the democrats and the republicans. All you have to do is list the issues that got completely ignored in this election to see that what the two parties agree to ignore just does not get mentioned. Proof would be that Trump was chosen as the non-democrat non-republican candidate, or the closet facsimile thereof. Trump won under the none of the above category. Having said that apart from some remarks by the RNC chairperson immeditely after the 2012 election, which any odds maker would have considered something to sink into a dead silence and be ultimately forgotten, the actual mea mea culpea of the Republicans came out, as I understand in a March 2014 document. Certainly more than ten days after the election. So you are making an apples and oranges comparison. Where the democrats will be 16 months after this election in their analysis cant be said as we speak. Voting patterns have been sufficiently predictable that it looks like the republicans have the advantage as long as the electoral college continues to determine the winner. So the movement towards ending its reign of terror would appear to be the option that a winning party would take. Not just a power grab, but a serious attempt to readdress the imbalance of voting power. Whether the reasons exist to get rid of the college at this time, in a dispassionate analysis, the fear and anger are definitely there, and Trump is the person to be thanked for this. And despite your characterization of confusion and dismay among democrats I see them beginning a movement that nearly half of the eligible voters appear to agree with, which is that the presidential elections are a joke and should be democratic, one man one vote. As a californian, why should I bother to vote when I knew people in Wyoming have hundreds if not thousands of times more voting power than I do? Finally a major party is waking up to that fact. I’d say that is a significant response to the recent election. Especially after only ten days.

The electoral college is and was the deciding voice,not the popular vote,and it did its intended purpose by denying huge populated clown states the right to deny the people in less populated non special interest dominated states political power.
And those rules have been around for centuries,and to harp post election on rules that both candidates knew were the deciding factor is just w(h)iney sour grapes from hypocrites.

People like myself and Glenn Greenwald refer to the Republican and Democratic parties as separate entities, for practical (journalistic) purposes, but most of us here know that they are united in a common goal for power, influence, money, and status. It’s as people often say, “the scum rises to the top.”

But sadly, too many Americans are deluded into thinking that one party is “good”, and the other party is “bad”. That much is true. I have also seen too many anti-Hillary people defending Trump to no end, and vice-versa. Truth is, both of them are extremely corrupt. I have become aware of the fact that people are finally starting to see the duopoly for what it really is, particularly younger people (but some older people too).

When I referred to “most of us here”, I meant the community here at The Intercept. The opening of the eyes of the American public, in general, to the corruption of the duopoly is also a particularly recent development, and would not necessarily be reflected in election results in years past. What happens in future elections going forward is anyone’s guess.

It does kill me, though, when people see Libertarianism as a deviation from the current structure, when really, calling for the deregulation of almost everything is hiding the fact that a Libertarian system would be an absolute paradise for corporate greed. (The Koch Brothers are Libertarian.) The haves would have even more, and the have-nots would have even less. It could (and probably would) devolve over time into Anarcho-corporate Fascism. But one thing I do agree with Libertarians on, is the need to cut excessive administrative waste in government.

And yes, as for voter integrity – it’s the lack of it, as well as lack of principle, but also ignorance. Voting for “the lesser of two evils”, as Jill Stein said, “eventually leads to the greater evil.” Voters chose to vote against that which they oppose, instead of voting for what they really support. I am a former Sanders supporter who voted for Stein, and I voted on principle. But, I did not agree with everything Stein advocated for – I just happened to find it the most agreeable.

Gee Glenn, you’d think Democrats didn’t win the popular vote by a million or more. This is just a simple-minded article. You should actually be deathly worried that Trump is going to try to have you killed via a CIA operation. Seriously. Yet here you are pounding on your favorite target – the Democratic Party that never ceases to fail you. This is almost a #slatepitch article. Hint: if you think Dems would have won *more* votes by stopping the surveillance state and drone killings – things you’ve railed against for years as a failure of Obama on moral, legal and strategic grounds, well, I’ve got a lovely Trump unit to sell you in Trump Tower Tampa. To wit: Trump is about to restart a widespread torture regime. And yet – here you are slapping Democratic leadership in the face. What a joke.

As for the Democratic Party, I say let it die , just like the Whig Party did in the 1850’s. From its ashes will rise a powerful Green Party to counter the authoritarian plutocracy of the Republican Party.

From my perspective, the Green party will never be relevant at the national level as long as they run candidates that illustrate that

1) not even they take serious the idea they might actually winand become President. Jill Stein, commander in chief, making foreign policy decisions, having relevant experience etc — seriously? A Stein vote is just a more rational, intelligent variation of the “I’m voting for the tribe/antagonistic stance to the status quo, not the person’s credentials or ability” that the Trump vote represents.

2) specifically regarding Stein … a medical doctor that panders to the anti-vaxxers? I understand that this is important in their base and all, but learning that stopped my consideration of her dead in its tracks.

Republicans supplanted Whigs because they forged a new indpendent identity, they had unifying new ideas and that brought people to them. Not because they just created a party and then went on a campaign to peel off Whigs.

Jill Stein is not an “anti-vaxxer” – this is a total bastardization of her stance on vaccines. She had advocated for the removal of mercury and other harmful substances in vaccines, and wants independent lab testing and vetting of vaccines, to make sure that they meet the criteria for acceptable vaccine standards.

“Let it die?” Why not take advantage of the need right now for good leadership and revive it to serve the people it purports to serve? It’s a building that needs renovation. Tearing it down means decades of rebuilding a new party. Do we really have that long?

Not all of us are finished, not unless Trump and the Republicans ban elections in our country. The open minded and far-sighted among the Democrats need to leave the party and join the Green Party, just like the Whigs fled their party and joined the new Republican Party in the 1850’s. We need a sincere and caring Left in this country to counter Trump, and the Dem Establishment ain’t it.

The Democratic party’s fatal mistake, in sum, is that they (1) undermined the elastic ability of the American people to vote their interests and not pledge allegiance to a party affiliation (e.g. the “Stronger Together” slogan Hillary used didn’t fool enough people), (2) underestimated the net negative impact of running a campaign based largely on shaming those who go against their interests, and most of all, (3) took their power and privilege for granted in various acts of conceit, to the point where their ulterior motives became obvious (this one is more long-term)

Mass state rep; US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former mayor of San Antonia; Senator from New Jersey; Minn state rep; Gov. of Rhode Island; Assoc. Prof. at Fordham (and I think future successful politician); Mayor of LA . . . all saying the same things some of us around her are saying. The Democratic party leadership ignores that at its own risk (and ours).

The Democratic Party is now acting like a husband caught cheating by his wife: “If only you were a better wife it would not have come to this”.

Way back in U.S. history during the time of “Trust Busting” the elites just successfully moved to take control of the states in order have their way. Look at Chris Christie in NJ as he raised tolls, gas prices, and is now starting a war between the local states, which will double state income taxes of citizens working in neighboring states, he even unsuccessfully privatized the lottery, and all so obviously made a deal to throw his comrades under the bus for his deplorable Gestapo like “Bridge Gate” bullying. Chris Christie is just one horrible example of what happens when the GOP takes over any portion of a state government, which would not have happened if the corrupt Democrats were not just as bad a choice.

Democratic party is excessively entrenched. Despite a historic loss / blown opportunity, leadership cannot take off their blinders and change. We now see this with Chuck Schumer’s election to Senate Minority leader. The worst example of an entrenched establishment Dem who supports Wall Street over Main street, he famously pushed the idea that we need not worry about losing blue collar votes in Pennsylvania, because for each one we lose, we’ll pick up two suburban Philadelphia Republicans…. how’d that work for ya?

The fact that Chuck Schumer and his fellow Democrats basically say… Do…“not worry about losing blue collar votes” is deplorable. It is a quintessential example of how the 99% have no major party left to advocate or even care about them.

The Democrat Party has sabotaged themselves in racism using social justice warriors, feminists, left-wingers and others to claim that white people (or maybe just white straight males) are to blame for their woes rather than themselves. Throwing riots, lootings, and protests that burn things down and use violence and block highways etc is giving the Democrats a bad name for their crybullies taking over college campuses and being special snowflakes blaming scapegoats for their own problems instead of being raised a spoiled brat and put on a trust fund so they can attend ivy league colleges and universities and throw these protests.

Democrats don’t admit to mistakes, blame the GOP and anyone who criticizes the Democrats for their own failings. Obama promised to help poor people and raise social security, he did none of that. He helped pass the ACA, but it was a ticking time bomb as only the sick signed up for it and healthy people refused to sign up and take a tax penalty instead. So now it is a pyramid scam where monthly fees and co-pays are going up.

They even still blame Bush II, and Obama promised he’d fix problems instead of blaming them on Bush II or the GOP. Yet 7+ years later and Obama is still blaming Republicans, he even blames Trump, but Trump has not taken office yet and can’t pass any bills to laws, etc.

I agree. I’ve seen much faster processing of this crushing (emotional) loss than I saw with the Republicans. And here’s the kicker: the platform adopted at the DNC, with strong help from the Bernie camp, pushed it in a more progressive direction, won the popular vote and picked up a few seats in Congress. The seeds have been planted and by high-ranking officials being pushed out, there is a vacuum to be filled by the Bernie-leaning Dems who have a chance to pull self-declared independents into their fold.

Republicans can blindly choose to see the electoral college win as proof that the American public agrees with them. But any gloating Republicans, high on their “victory” with Trump will have a raging adrenaline hangover once actual governing starts. And possibly worse in 2018.

Dems actually have much more to gain right now than Republicans who despised Trump and then have turned into Trump ass kissers since his win. Trump is not interested in governing; he’s interested in Trump, first and foremost. Their refusal to see it would be to their peril.

To hell with the democrats- is it possible to rebrand the Green Party? This will be tough. I’ve been posting this around as some of my coastal liberal friends probably think they are voting for a party that cares about the environment.

DNC 2016 platform: carbon tax Voted down 7-6 Ban on fracking Voted down 7-6. Keep fossils in the ground, at least on federal land Voted down 7-6. A measure to mandate that federal agencies weigh the climate impact of their decisions Voted down 7-6. A plan to keep fossil fuel companies from taking private land by eminent domain, voted down 7-6. Per Bill McKibben who was on the panel via Sanders.

Look, this is an old idea, that anybody who has followed American history, culture and politics understands quite intuitively (and also as a function of scholarly inquiry across a whole bunch of academic disciplines).

And yes this is about “cultural brainwashing” and class. And unless and until the Democratic party can change this perception (perception is reality for most humans), assuming it wants to and as presently constructed I’m not at all convinced it does, among a much broader cross section of the population (and not just “whites” but all of America’s “working class”), then don’t expect to win elections consistently.

America isn’t about left vs. right. It has been and always will be about up vs. down/oligarchs vs. working class. There was a brief period in America when a sizeable majority of Americans understood that to one degree or another.

And unless that is re-inculcated into the minds of enough, the bipartisan oligarchs of this nation will continue to successfully divide and pit the working class against each other as successfully as they have done for almost the entirety of America’s existence.

You have working class solidarity in a culture or nation-state or you don’t. And if you don’t, the working class (regardless of “race”, “gender”, “religion”, “national origin”, “sexual orientation/gender identity”) of that culture or nation-state will get fucked supremely by the capitalist oligarchs or hereditary monarchs and their retainers and functionaries.

If you can’t grasp that simple historical reality (across almost every “culture” in human history) then you are part of the problem. IMHO.

Why is it you don’t think the American public education system focuses on “Labor history” as part of its core curriculums in this nation? Guesses, anyone, Buehler?

Why do you think the number one cultural mythology in this country parroted across every single disseminator of “culture” is of the scrappy individualized atomized bootstrappy Horatio Alger citizen and not the narrative that everything positive that has ever occurred for the working class (or any of its sub-constituents i.e. “identities”) is function of solidarity and class struggle?

As always- good stuff Glenn. Hillary Clinton had the best analysts, marketing gurus, pollsters that her (Billion?) dollars in Citizens United funding could buy- and that Citizens United-pay-to-play-what-we-want-to-hear-jukebox-polling played “You’re The One That I Love” all night long, didn’t it?

I’d LOVE to read a thoughtful reflection about why the corporate media and their corporate juke-box-polling was so completely wrong, as it illustrates the True effects of Citizens United money upon American Politics…

Ultimately, American politics needs more *Clinton* like American politics needs more *Citizens United Money* in American politics. With Sanders stating that Clinton will play a future role in the DNC, it sounds like Sanders is simply making concessionary statements in preparation of taking over the DNC. However, if the DNC is not purged of all establishment *Pied-Piper-strategists*…this will simply be re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…AFTER it has dramatically plunged beneath the
waves.

Trump did not cause some giant groundswell. Nationwide GOP votes in 2016 pretty much matched GOP votes in 2008 and 2012. Lower turnout by Dem voters — matching 2004 — was not enough to win.

The two culprits I see for poor Dem turnout: (1) Lousy messaging (2) A shopworn candidate who ignored pleas, with data & concrete suggestions, from the field

The DNC does not care about the state level. Dr Dean was kicked out at the DNC & its been a disaster ever since. Bring back the 50-state strategy, which included great grassroots leadership training. That’s how you build a party & the leaders of tomorrow — from the ground up.

Glen. As always giving credit where credit is due. Consistently holding both parties and our beloved MSM to the same standards of conduct before during and after every election REGARDLESS of election outcomes.

People claim he’s got dogs in every fight but in truth he’s only their to save and rehome them to loving families.

Wapo is more malignant and as lying as the NYTs,so is that good or bad,associating GG with them?
Why all of a sudden,does the Wapo care what he says?
They have been the worst example of journalistic malpractice since the printing press was invented,and every MSM was involved,along with much of the alleged liberal left,in the tank for the most corrupt criminal idiot in American electoral history.
A complete mockery of fair play,and I’m sure another catalyst in the election of DT as POTUS.
And to call him an idiot for defeating the whole zionist apparatus and mainstream rethugs and demoncrats,and all the absolute calumny,slander and misrepresentation,is the sign of a rabid lunatic baying at the moon.
They are still at it,the divide and conquer creeps.
And yeah,the demoncrats helped give the powers to the shrub,who gave them to 0,and so on.
The gifts of terror.

I’m not associating Glenn with the overall establishment friendly editorial practices (abysmal) of the Putin baiting WP or NYT.

I was simply providing a link to a recent Greenwald article in the WP. Even bogus MSM pubs have a few occasionally bright spots like Charle Savage at the NYT or Bart Gelman at the WP. Sure the MSM use Glenn to burnish their veneer of objective authenticity but the articles worth a read.

We need to OCCUPY the MEDIA…Unite and spread the word of alternatives! Next episode of Workin’ Progress is now out-“OCCUPY THE MEDIA” https://youtu.be/d2xnms84N3c Please share, subscribe, like, etc! Discussion of some of the best alternative progressive media sources. And why it’s important to turn off mainstream media and turn on these other voices.We need to build and support alternative media!?

Letting the corporate media into your home guarantees you the same thing you would get when placing yourself at a poker table with a degenerate poker player in that you can be sure of three things: he will relentlessly be lying to you, distracting you, or setting you up for his next big lie.

In casting shade at all those poor Democrats Mr. Greenwald absolves of any guilt himself, all the Bernie-or-Bust types and other ideological dilettantes who preferred to remain “pure” than to prevent a monster from occupying the White House. To all those Hillary-dissing Puritans who saw her as the greater of two evils, how’s the Trump Presidency working out for you so far?
(This question will be repeated periodically until Trump’s Homeland Security finally shuts down social media.)

I’ve had it with the Clinton shamers who, after she just barely lost the election, are writing volumes analyzing her and the Democratic Party to discover their faults, their shortcomings, their missteps. It’s fine to reflect but in the end is just attempting to shift the blame. Bottom line: Trump won because conservatives, alt-righters, misogynists and racists all united behind him. Clinton lost because liberals and progressives failed to unite behind her. It’s not on her, it’s on us.

The old saying is true: During the primaries you fall in love, during the election you fall in line. We didn’t. We lost.

Don’t make excuses, don’t fantasize about might-have-beens, don’t blame the candidate who, after all, got two million more votes than the victor. It’s on us.

Clinton got her clock cleaned in the only election being contested, the Electoral College. These achievatrons are smart, they’ve risen to the top of the meritocracy and know what game is being played. They win even when they lose elections.

Exactly. Hell, when you’ve got outspoken Republicans supporting a candidate who agreed to a very progressive platform and had Bernie’s and Warren’s backing, it’s idiotic for progressives to not support that candidate.

The Republicans didn’t learn a damn thing either in 2012, they got lucky to have a populist nominee in spite of the Party brass doing everything it could to prevent it. If the RNC had got its way and Jeb or similar had been nominated, there’s be a Democratic president-elect today.

On the contrary, they would’ve won by a bigger margin if their nominee had been anyone else but Trump. They got lucky that the Democratic establishment foisted the unelectable, overwhelmingly hated, blatantly corrupt Hillary Clinton onto their base.

Despite GOP mea culpa, 100 pages worth, the party still failed to right itself. They denied the rise of Trump as opponent after opponent fell. At the eleventh hour the party finally took him into its embrace. I would argue both the GOP and the DNC have officially imploded as of this election season. Neither is aligned with an electoral base, but with their corporate interests which have been punishing the electorate financially these last sixty years or more.

I think it’s fucking ridiculous to try to figure out why “the voters” go for this or that candidate or that Party, since both Parties’ establishments are compromised and ultimately unified in their desire to serve the corrupt ruling class.

People attracted to Obama’s charisma or Trump’s dynamism or whatever certainly indicate moronic impulses in the populace to be attracted to shiny things, but making either of the major Parties appealing in any way is not a positive phenomenon to be deciphered but an advertising or propagandistic success at selling gross inequality, war and loss of civil liberties to the common people.

The establishment is committed to corruption and dominion-of-the-elite.

The establishment uses both Parties for this. It uses Obama’s charisma, for instance, and the Clintons’ money connections, and it is using Trump’s appeal, too (such as it is), TO PURSUE CORPORATISM, MILITARISM AND IMPERIALISM UNDER THE GUISE OF A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS.

So fuck them both, the Republicans and the Democrats. They want precisely what progressives (and libertarians) don’t want, and I hope with all my heart that they both forget how to be appealing to anyone at all and fuck off forever.

Both Parties pursue corporatism, militarism and imperialism to an entirely unacceptable extent – all in service of the elite – comprised of ruling class and the Deep State (inclusive of the military-industrial complex).

If both are unacceptable, the argument for either one is at best a lesser of two evils argument which is unconvincing to those like me who believe the lesser of two evils can be the more effective of the evils, as Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report argued about President Obama .

From all indications the Democrats will stay stubbornly compromised and neoliberal regardless of how clearly they are criticized for it (while talking a good but mere lip-service talk, of course) – and my “odd beliefs” dictate that I can no more support that than the nonsense of the GOP. If more people were as “odd” as me, perhaps the Parties would have an incentive to curb the corporatism, militarism and the imperialism they both indulge so criminally.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Every post of yours is a little more deranged than the last. At this pace, you’ll be a targeted individual in about 6 months. By the way, how is Jill Stein doing? Also, is it true she has been frozen in Carbonite, and will be thawed out in 4 years to start her next Presidential run? Seems plausible but I cannot distinguish news from reality, thanks to Facebook!!

I’m very, very, very fond of you, Doug, but I’m not going to do that – I’m presuming it’s about the setting up of a new forum of sorts, and while I wish that project much luck I’m not really into pursuing such a thing. The activist exodus here (especially of late) has made it at times like an unwelcoming ghost town, and my imminent absence even here is pretty much a done deal, but be assured I’ve enjoyed our interactions even though I’m inclined nowadays to dramatically reduce rather than expand my online presence.

Actually, it’s perfect. Glenn’s die hard fans SHOULD start their own little exclusive web forum, where the 6-8 of them can talk to/vituperate against/with the 6-8 of themselves, till they pass out from lack of oxygen.

Meanwhile, the world rots. But what do they care? As long as they can prop each other up, stroke each other’s egos, and pretend their conversation has a net-positive effect on the rest of the world… Like any one’s listening. Especially after they’ve already alienated everyone they think doesn’t have a high enough IQ to talk to them. What arrogance!

I may be the only one here that appreciates the irony of a bunch of self-described elitists, bitching about the stupidity of elitists that live in a bubble echo chamber. Whatevs. Have fun, jack assess!

The “active exodus” is due entirely to the hatchet attacks from -Mona- on the most innocuous commenters. She finally got called for her atrocious behavior.
She’s a bit like Hillary; riding someone’s coattails and leaving a slime trail.

I wouldn’t take it personally and it is my understanding the invites aren’t based on anything other that some longstanding relationships forged a long time ago back in the day under Glenn’s original blogging and at Salon. And mostly a way to stay in touch with that group who has fallen away from here for one reason or another. It isn’t about being cool, or have anything necessarily to do with anyone’s “ideological” outlook, as some of those who were invited often disagree with each other quite vehemently.

It is my understanding that most of those who were invited aren’t abandoning TI so they can simply create a new echo chamber. I’m not nor will I ever, that’s not why I started commenting under Glenn’s work in the first instance.

@ nuf said

I’m going to ask you in all sincerity, do you realize that part of why so many long time regular commenters who have commented under Glenn’s work for years have abandoned this place (to the degree they have), is because of petty little bullshit like the following that you are just as responsible for, as Mona is (not that I will comment on who I think is more or less at “fault” because it is irrelevant)?

The “active exodus” is due entirely to the hatchet attacks from -Mona- on the most innocuous commenters. She finally got called for her atrocious behavior.
She’s a bit like Hillary; riding someone’s coattails and leaving a slime trail.

Seriously, do you possess that capacity for introspection about your own role around here in what is happening here?

The quality of that dialogue above, regardless of the nature of you and Mona’s little beefs, is precisely what’s distracting to so many of us.

Now I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say I’ve never made a mountain out of a molehill around here over the years (infrequently) or really laid into someone in a personal way, because I have. But I usually don’t start out a dialogue like that and don’t go there until it is made personal with me, and even then I’ve gotten much better at ignoring it. And even when it does happen, I try and fairly quickly let it go, try to ignore that commenter or only engage them on the merits. But what I most certainly do not do is show up in every single thread and resurrect a little personal vendetta against some other commenter day in and day out. IMHO, you have. And often have over the years.

Now without a doubt, Mona has a tendency to be strident at times and never let it go either, in language that I would not necessarily choose, or at least not as frequently as Mona chooses to employ that language. Maybe that’s justified, and maybe it isn’t depending on your perspective.

But simple fact of the matter is it usually takes two to tango. At least you should consider the possibility that you don’t have necessarily have clean hands in this matter and please fucking stop with your petty little backbiting bullshit constantly. It’s why I mostly choose not to engage you over the years. I don’t find much productive or insightful about your commenting style or the substance of it–but others may so in the interests of a free flowing open forum I mostly leave you alone.

It’s not about ideological disagreements, or the merits of any particular issue, it’s that the comments system has become so degraded and spammed with ridiculous amounts of non-relevant posts (often having little or nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of the writer’s piece) and loopy conspiracy theories that the purpose of commenting (to share and contest ideas) has been at times functionally eliminated.

That’s why some are leaving. Nothing more, nothing less. And maybe everybody, and me included, and I’m trying and have been trying for quite some time, should consider their role and behavior in making this a place where people can disagree without personal vendettas dominating or without the discourse being so unwieldy as to be pointless.

The activist exodus here (especially of late) has made it at times like an unwelcoming ghost town, and my imminent absence even here is pretty much a done deal, but be assured I’ve enjoyed our interactions even though I’m inclined nowadays to dramatically reduce rather than expand my online presence.

If commenters want to set up their own site to create a discussion environment that is more suitable to their preferences, that, of course, is their absolute right, and I’m happy if people are able to do that successfully.

The way online political journalism and commentary works has changed significantly over the last decade, and many of those changes (particularly though not only the advent of social media) have rendered comment sections less used and thus less useful. As a result, media organizations are increasingly abolishing comment sections altogether, while many who keep them are devoting fewer resources to them.

That said, there is no discernible “exodus” from the comment section here, at least from a quantitative perspective. If anything, the number of people reading the comment section has been fairly steady, or even ticked upward, over the last year.

It’s true that after a couple days (by which point only a few die-hards arguing with one another are still reading) – or after the 300th comment – the quality diminishes, but that’s always been true. If you look at the first 100 comments left after this article, the quality is quite high: largely substantive, a good mix of people agreeing and disagreeing, very little personal acrimony and recrimination.

As a result, media organizations are increasingly abolishing comment sections altogether, while many who keep them are devoting fewer resources to them.

To be fair, commenters did not always fully recognize the brilliance of the articles, and often criticized them, generally for no good reason. This hardly added value to the organization’s ‘brand’ and thus there are no compelling reasons to keep the comment section.

In addition, many commenters are slow to pivot as quickly as required by the new fake news paradigm. They therefore often retain attitudes which are days, if not weeks, old. This completely undermines the whole purpose of publishing fake news.

There is, however, promise in the artificial intelligence domain, using new software which will allow AI’s to generate comments within a tightly defined range of intellectual and emotional parameters that will serve to complement, rather than undermine, the theme of the article. Hopefully, The Intercept is working on such a system or else it risks being left behind with obsolete commenting technology of the twentieth century which depended on unstable human input.

I haven’t been “around” since Salon and certainly never had the pleasure of working with Glenn as Mona has or simply being in the room while Glenn cut his teeth as a journalist well before he was a household name.

Some of our number have been enamored of Glenn for a decade and more. I am not among them. My unavoidable loss but no harm no foul.

I guess the it’s just the stalwart fan in me (unjustifiably) wanting a “backstage pass”
to rub shoulders with the Glenneratti.

I don’t understand the need for commenters to try to 1-UP each other, nor the failure to understand the perspectives of others (even if we disagree). Are we really so egotistical that we have to put everyone else’s views down, no matter what?

This is a microcosm of exactly what is wrong with standard contemporary political discourse these days. That twitch to immediately rush to judgment, nitpick at every minutiae of detail, and launch ad hominem attacks against each other, instead of asking questions and offering respectful rebuttals.

Geez, what happened to Greenwald?
The only mention of Bernie Sanders was as one of the excuses the Democrats are using…. if we’re going to talk about ‘introspection’ and ‘critique’ then honesty and truth are in order.

Hillary and the DNC factually handed Donald Trump the White House the moment they rallied to derail Bernie Sanders. It literally happened in that moment. Trump could have run around the stage screaming with his clothes off, and he pretty much did, and still won after that. Bernie Sanders was a once in a lifetime occurrence who’s voter reach spanned across all age groups, parties affiliations, ethnicities, and gender. And the DNC thought they could ‘steal’ Bernie’s thunder under the umbrella of Hillary? They obviously didn’t want what was best for the party. They wanted business as usual.
And Hillary’s unbridled desire for more power – (I guess being First Lady, a Senator, Secretary of State, Filthy Rich, just wasn’t enough for her) – stole our best chance from us as well.

Interstate Crosschecking of Voter Records is the other elephant in the room and Greenwald won’t touch it with a 10ft. poll. He’s dead silent on it even though all the facts and paper trail are laid out. But the numbers of votes scrubbed using a program, that was purposely designed by the Koch Brothers to give them the swing states, and the paper trial with all the facts leading back to the Koch’s 880 Billion investment in the outcomes of the 2016 election, now prove that it was indeed the followup knockout shot, to the jab Hillary took out Bernie with, that synched the election.

A brilliant piece of raw spew which deservedly shoves both these political parties loathsome noses to the edge of the woodchipper.

None of this legitimating “unflinching self-criticism” shit. None of this horrifying normalization of an aspiring fascist and his attendant Himmlers rendered as welcome alternatives to a sick and cancerous establishment.

Nope.

Instead:

Irrelevant but for their bloated sugar daddy, such white supremacists cannot be willed into non-existence. But they can be isolated and weakened and deprived of importance, their most shameful and terrifying need from the straight world. Trump’s racist followers aren’t the “alt-right,” a marketing appellation coined within that community which the media readily, regrettably adopted. If they must be thought of at all, they are “shitheads,” “anime Nazis,” or simply, “Republicans.”

If I had the ability to think like this, to write like this, to take all the rage in my heart and throw it at the world, I would do so. This is brilliant shit.

Even the Baron von Harkonnen scene applies on a deep and nauseating level.

The endless celebrity deification, the forced jocularity, the feigned hipness, the idiotic sops to pop culture, the lifeless, stage-managed jokes, the pervading sense that this was all perfunctory to her, an inconvenient hurdle to be cleared, en route to the office that was somehow her’s by right — the abiding sense that whoever Hillary Clinton actually is, she is not going to be found in public. It seemed like this inclination was only worsened by her advisers, one of the most rancid collections of suck-ups, influence-peddlers, and incompetents since the Harding Administration. (In fairness, Trump is about to give her a run for the money.)

This is the way of truths, especially in this age of nosepicking nonsense and nitpicking newsreaders — two opposing truths can be equally true.

Simultaneously.

This piece is an honest assessment of this election, a rotting wound in a dying world from which common decency has been cursed and chased away like a pagan herbalist offering moldy bread.

All this pondering bull crap about who who who. The Demo are just as stupid as the GOP. Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, Clinton, Clinton Clinton, did that get through. It was her plain and simple. The Demo Jack Ass would have done no better. We found out early that the DNC was rotten to the core, but damn it the Russians did it. The many e-mails told it all day after day releases after releases but we took no notice because the Russian did it. Talk about fake stories that is all we had for the last year but not all of the public ate it up. Side note: The New York times has totaled destroyed itself as a newspaper, been going that way for quite a while but now it open and shut.
On the GOP side go back and take a good hard look at the group of idiots that were running. If any of us us jumped in we would have come off in the top spot. Trump is a joke but please Hillary is a joke, Sanders is a bigger joke, Obama is a total joke and the cesspool of GOPs are just plain sad. But that is America today and if we think we are going to get out of this mess we are all idiots.

The DNC has the chance but undoubtedly will not, to do the right thing. They should stop propagating the we vs them scenario and try to find common ground with the Trump administration. I believe his ego can be used to cause healing. He wants to make history and would be open to all sorts of good legislation if given the opportunity. Why does consensus on abortion and gun policy divide us? Because we are being inflexible. Why can’t we start an era of having to choose between two very similar but excellent candidates instead of two seeming monsters? We need to seek the grey zone of reason.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around the Democratic losses can be put mostly on the Clintons for their adoption of a neoliberal agenda that abandoned the working middle class. The Republicans may have put together a critical report after the 2012 election but there’s no evidence that they followed their own recommendations.

The Republicans engaged in soul searching in 2012, but failed to find a soul. Instead, they discovered that voting machines in the rust-belt states were eminently hackable. Mr. Trump even proclaimed this before the vote, proclaiming that the election was rigged. However, many people interpreted this to mean it was rigged against the Republicans and so failed to connect the dots. In retrospect, it was obvious, however, as the Republicans ran the weakest candidate they could find, deliberately insulted key demographic groups, and still won.

Hopefully, the Democrats learned their lesson and will employ better hackers in 2020.

There’s an excellent article you should read on The Intercept about how Democrats are refusing to accept blame and continue pointing the finger at everyone and everything but themselves. It would be quite instructive for someone like you that blames voting machines for the election loss with absolutely no proof or even a rational basis for such a claim. Sadly, though, you won’t read the article. You’ll just keep blaming others for your bad choices.

You misconstrue my comment. I applaud the Republicans’ enterprising spirit. While the Democrats passively waited for the voters to cast their votes, the Republicans were pro-active and took concrete steps to ensure the right outcome was achieved. That’s what makes America great.

The Democrats have an “identity” problem. After rejecting both the New and Old Left, the Democratic Party mutated into a cash-raising machine without a popular ideology (pick your neo-). In a multi-party system they would have withered in less than a decade. However, in our system, they count on winning voter allegiances by default or by fear. The one thing they cannot tolerate is someone challenging them by appealing to a more popular ideology, hence the exaggerated contempt for Sanders and Stein. Democrats would rather lose to the GOP than lose control of their political ATM.

The “Accept-No-Responsibility-Blame-Everyone-Else posture” is the guiding principle behind the “Social Justice” arm of the Democratic Party, so it’s no wonder that so many who have been ideologically certain of their “rightness” for so long, are refusing to face the reality that their cause does not translate into sufficient votes. Years from now, we may look back at the last 10 years and realize that the “Tea Party” and the “Social Justice Warrior” factions were two poisonous sides of the same coin, and that they both hijacked their respective parties with the kind of zealotry that leads only to conflict and division. “Divide and conquer” is a very effective strategy of war, but only when the target is your enemy. It doesn’t work so well when you divide and conquer your own supporters, and that’s precisely what we have just witnessed within the Democratic Party.

I watched Sen Sanders on BBC….Sanders made clear, however, that he plans to play a very different role in the party. He wants Democrats to pick sides. “I think at the end of the day the Democratic Party has to make a fundamental decision, and it goes back to an old song by Woody Guthrie…‘Which Side Are You On?’ “It is not possible,” the senator continued, “to be a candidate of corporate America, not possible to be a candidate of the insurance companies or Wall Street, not take huge amounts of money from powerful special interests and then say, ‘Well, I’m going to champion the needs of a declining middle class.’ I don’t think you can do that.”http://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-democrats-522342
I guess, he is the only one who gets it!

WOW! I guess, I am not making myself clear…
My comment was about Bernie Sanders talking about Democratic Party….he is the only one from the Democratic Party leaders who realise that it can not be business as usual!

Don’t they all? At least,Sen Sanders would not have been “lesser of the two evil” candidate imho….. and would have won against Mr Trump. Sadly, the WHOLE SYSTEM is rigged and someone like Mr Dennis Kucinich would never be allowed to become the president.

It’s no secret that the Democratic Party in the states has withered during Barack Obama’s eight years in office. That usually happens — people tend to blame the president for everything from foreign crises to the crack in the sidewalk in front of their house, and take it out on his party — but the decline during this presidency has been particularly steep. And now, as Democrats try to claw their way out of the crater they find themselves in, they need to pay attention to the states, as much as they may not want to…. – Paul Waldman

But Republicans didn’t really do much in the way of changing from what I can tell, IMHO. They did the critique, but either didn’t do anything or didn’t have enough time to do anything.

One could argue that this sort of change takes time. But were there any indications of any change of Republican policy positions in the 2014 mid-term elections?

If not, this may be why the populace took out their anger on both parties and voted Trump. Republicans have never been the voice of the average worker. In fact, quite the opposite. Always catering to the 1% and doing so with conviction.

Democrats have forgotten or replaced their core constituencies of Middle America, Unions, etc in favor of pushing out Republicans in order to cater to the 1% unconditionally.

We essentially now have 2 parties that cater to the 1%. With those sort of options, is it really that far-fetched or unforeseeable that Trump would rise to a victory?

I wonder how much searing self-criticism Republicans would have displayed in 2012 — or any other year in which a Democrat won a presidential election — if the Democratic candidate had received an “amazing” gift from the Democrat in charge of the immensely powerful (and allegedly politically neutral) Federal Bureau of Investigation with eleven days to go. (OK, that was sarcasm. I really don’t wonder at all.)

I don’t deny that Democrats need to identify and take responsibility for their own problems, so my comment does not disagree with the thesis so much as the argument content. (I’m in college-essay grading mode right now anyway.) It’s hardly just “one irony” that the GOP’s introspective report had no actual effect on the party’s politics or policy and that they subsequently won a yuge victory with a candidate who spent his whole campaign metaphorically shredding it; it’s the strongest counterargument against the thesis. Now, the driving force behind that introspection will work in that candidate’s administration. It easily leads to the question, why, then should that be a model for Democrats?

In other words, I see the point here, but I don’t think the argument as presented is going to convince anyone who thinks either that we just need to be more vigilant against “enemies” or that the real lesson of 2016 is that Democrats need their own brand of fact-immune populism.

The GOP soul-search after ’12 opened the way for a lackluster organization that produced the likes of Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, etc. Take away Trump and the GOP would have been crushed.

Also:

– GOP stole the votes (rigged elections are as American as apple pie, see Truman, JFK, Bush II, etc.). What matters is not political efficiency (Greenwald’s argument) but skill of GOP hackers.

– Clinton did win the popular vote, admittedly not by enough. The Dem machine did do something right.

– Trump is a boob but his followers are ambitious villains; if they are not reined in the country is in big trouble. See, ‘Turkey’. (See Weimar Republic … )

– Trump’s presidency will fail, not for esoteric political reasons or a resurgent Democratic party but because we have exhausted our supply of affordable natural resource capital: petroleum, waste carrying capacity, fresh water, etc. The loss of resources makes everyone poorer; Trump’s supporters are those jettisoned from the fuel waste economy.

– The Trump campaign is our nation’s last gasp effort to consume what resources are left to us, this approach (not limited to GOP strategists) is not wisdom or reform but the way to certain ruin. ( Consuming what’s left includes our last reserves of affordable credit.)

Glenn’s point isn’t that the GOP’s candidates, or Donald Trump for that matter, followed the suggestions in the autopsy, it was the difference between actually blaming everybody but themselves, or trying to engage in introspection regardless.

I’m not so sure of that. The takeaway for me is that in this election the GOP got out of the way of it’s members. The Democrats, on the other hand, did everything they could to get in the way of (and as a result) disenfranchise, theirs.

Clinton did win the popular vote, admittedly not by enough. The Dem machine did do something right.

No, they really didn’t do something right. They knew as well as the Rethugs that they were competing for the electoral vote, not the popular vote. They didn’t campaign as if that were the case. Also, winning the popular vote doesn’t mean much if you can’t motivate a much larger portion of the electorate to get out and vote.

I think the insane tantrums and infantile psychological breakdowns by liberals are dissipating. They have made complete fools of themselves. They fretted that the Trump supporters would not accept the results of the election, riot and get violent. After this amazing ‘pre-crime’ vision, they proceeded to do the same thing.

Now is the time for therapy dogs, safe spaces, silly putty, cry-ins, and the application of their oh so predictable double standard when someone with an ‘R’ next to their name happens to be in the White House.

“After this amazing ‘pre-crime’ vision, they proceeded to do the same thing.”

Sadly for you, they did nothing like that. Unless you consider racism and misogyny, not to mention cronyism and incompetence, to be the GOP platform. Also, it was Trumpers who said they “would not accept the results of the election, riot and get violent.”
Your party can win an election and you can still be a lying sack of shit.

So the #notmypresident riots, bullying electors by doxing, crying about how Hillary won the election because she won the pop vote – even though it doesn’t work that way – is not happening right now? Really?

The looking for scapegoats goes from top-to-down in the democratic party. Two of the most egregious I heard were from top female operatives was that Trump won white working class women voters because those women were infected with “internal misogyny”. Another top female operative blamed BernieBros because they bullied women voters into not expressing their support of Hillary online. She was not talking about the primaries but the general election.

From reading online sites where democratic activists post and hang out, I would estimate that about 2/3 of the posters blame the sexism and racism of voters (apparently the previously white Obama voters who voted Trump were infected with sexism). Any class or economic based analysis is either dismissed or attacked as itself racist and sexist. Of course, any criticism of Clinton and the campaign is dismissed with like charges.

The democratic party ain’t go anywhere soon–the pity as the nation will soon start redrawing Congressional districts and the gop will hold power in most states. Every time the democrats lose the party establishment and elites move the party to the right. Add to that an activist base that is embroiled in battles over issues of identity purity.

(The Time picture is of Bernie stumping for Clinton, which the gop elites and candidates did not do for their candidate. Oh, and the very first thing the democratic party elites did was to run to a meeting called by their biggest donors. Irony, you have to love it…)

In the week and a half since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, leading Democrats have moved with extraordinary speed to embrace the president-elect. The same individuals who before November 8 were denouncing Trump as an existential threat to the country and the world are now pledging to work and collaborate with him.

In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
[snip]
But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.
[snip]
But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny.
[snip]
Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.
[snip]
A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country).
[snip]
We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

And just to clarify, I disagree with the author of the above re: the following passage:

Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy.

No, no she wasn’t. She was fundamentally horrible there as well which is why, in part, she couldn’t turn out a significant portion of her base. Assuming “world affairs” means “trade”, “war”, “spreading freedom and liberty”, America’s commitment to spying on everybody all over the globe, on enabling, funding and arming some of the world’s worst most despicable theocrats and despots, and dropping bombs all over the globe in service of the ridiculously immoral “war on terror”, Israel-Palestine . . . again, assuming that’s what the author meant about “world affairs.”

If he meant things like humanitarian relief, digging wells, sending Peace Corp volunteers, nurses and doctors et al out into the world then fine. It was a throwaway phrase that meant nothing.

Liberals don’t stand against racism or misogyny. They viciously attack any woman or black person who happens to be a conservative. Liberals couldn’t stop calling Clarence Thomas an ‘uncle tom’. Their message to blacks and women:

Be careful! We will accept you. But you must join our party or we will hurl horrible racist and misogynistic insults at you.

Liberals stick their head in the sand when Dear Leader Obama supports racist Nazi battalions in the Ukraine who wave the Nazi and Confederate flags. They memory hole his support for extremely misogynistic jihadists in the middle east who love ethnic cleansing. They pardon Hillary Clinton of misogyny when she accepts bribes from intense women-hating actors in the middle east, simply because she has a ‘D’ next to her name.

Liberals don’t care about these issues. They simply claim to have the sole right to be racist and misogynist. They can trash Republican women and attack black people who don’t fall in line and join their party — with impunity.

Bennie Thompson, a black man, had every right to call Clarence Thomas an “uncle tom” if that is how Mr. Thompson feels. It’s sort of like the N-word. Black people get to use it if they wish, and white people with any sense of history and/or decency need to STFU about it. (I know, I know, identity politics something something argle bargle…)

Right. It just means they should do it “quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale.” Translation: Sure, liberals can stand against bigotry, but only in a low-key way that lets victims of bigotry know how unimportant they are and avoids at all costs hurting the precious feelings of bigots. (And why did some liberals get in a snit about “White” and “Colored” restrooms back in the day, anyhow? They were just restrooms; what was the big deal?)

Translate it however you choose. And nobody gives a shit about hurting the feelings of avowed bigots like the KKK.

But if you think you will ever win an election again in this country by tarring indiscriminately anyone who votes for the GOP as a bigot, then I say good luck to you pal. It likely isn’t going to be me out here in deep blue Oregon who bears the brunt of your shortsidedness and strident Manichean worldview about who comprises your political opposition.

In fact I’m really surprised your here parroting your deep deep thoughts derived from your new LGM pals, who are, with the exception of Prof. Loomis to one degree or another, engaging in precisely what Glenn is talking about.

Like I said, Gator, if you want to stick with the line that “this is all about racism and misogyny” (it is but not in its entirety and not in such a way that some of those people you believe are hard core bigots that can never be swayed (which obviously they aren’t as Obama got plenty of them to vote for him by comparison to Hillary Clinton)) then don’t be shocked if your identity politics yields and cries of “oh the GOP is nothing but bigots”) then I wouldn’t have much of an expectation other than achieving the precise same results the Dem party has been receiving all over the country except when they have a once in a generation pol like Pres. Obama who is charismatic and runs a near flawless campaign.

Sorry you don’t have the intellectual horsepower at your disposal to understand that reality, but it is what it is. And not only that, the Dem party will continue to hemorrhage other parts of its base if it is incapable of both standing up for the economic well being of all, and ensuring that their fellow citizens aren’t discriminated against.

Actually I’ve been reading LGM about as long I’ve been reading GG, i.e. 10 years plus. I believe I profit from both.

I don’t know what percentage of Trump voters are racists and/or misogynists. I do know that 100% of them did not find a presidential candidate’s overt racism and open misogyny to be disqualifying.

With that said, I’m all for Democrats trying to persuade the persuadables. But absolutely NOT at the cost of reducing the equality of women, non-whites, LGBTQ folk, Muslims and others to something that can only be advocated (in the words of the author whom you quoted with approval) “quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale.” No. Fucking. Way.

That’s not a good read on what actually happened. While it’s true that people vote in blocks, and there was an element of ethno-nationalism in this election, the fact that some people focus on identity politics swayed exactly no one in any direction.

the fact that some people focus on identity politics swayed exactly no one in any direction.

Define “no one”, and demonstrate that “no identity group” was “swayed”. Because I’d argue, as the author does, that “identity group” appeals aren’t enough or don’t “sway” enough to consistently win elections for the Democratic party. That’s his point. Broaden the message, broaden the appeal, because demographically the Democratic party isn’t in a position simply to appeal to “identity” and win consistently.

Not sure that is a very controversial proposition or inaccurate in any way.

The issue is that the Clinton campaign saw voters as monolithic identity groups and ran their campaign accordingly. Hillary made a parallel statement to what Palin made about “real Americans”–but Clinton’s term was “deplorables”. Identity politics did not work in a positive way to convince anybody as you say, but it did act as a negative in its exclusions.

Excellent analysis. The problem is that “diversity” within the democratic party went from inclusion to exclusion. To what people call identity politics. In the worst sense identity politics a person is solely and nothing more than a politically cliched version of their skin color, love orientation, gender, etc. Their class is never used as a defining characteristic– bringing class into it is attacked as sexist and racist.

I saw this up and down the democratic party: the belief that a coalition of certain proper “identity groups” alone could defeat the gop (that relied on very questionable thinking on voter demographics). And it started with Clinton and her supporters who in effect waged an “identity war” on Sanders and his supporters. It worked so well on Sanders it was continued into the general election. And the rest is history.

It’s a clear analysis and entirely on-point, Glenn, but. . . the underlying premise appears to be a tacit acceptance of the two-wing, one-party system, which I see as a fatal error.

Global, finance-industrial capitalism owns this two-in-one organization and all similar parties around the world. And that system is entirely incompatible with democracy, because it inevitably results in some form of one dollar, one vote government and policy-making.

All the related conversations spouting out from the corporate media, inane talk radio hosts and even us bloggers about the Democrats verses the Republicans just serve as a distraction. They are tricking us into fanaticizing about a difference that does not even exist in order that we do not focus on the psychopaths that have bought all the public non-servants so very long ago and do with them as they will.

Just like Donald Trump and his rescue of the American economy and his Make America Great Again program, Mr. Greenwald is coming to the rescue of the very problem he worked so hard to create. Indeed, Mr. Greenwald’s “principled” vicious, one-sided, blind lies about Hillary Clinton and the Foundation, his promotion of the Watergate style stolen information about the campaign via Mr. Putin and Mr. Assange with its slow release to cause maximum damage, his overlooking Mr. Comey’s most extraordinary abuse of power beyond anyone’s dream’s, even J. Edgar Hoover, whose principle Mr. Greenwald now aligns with, the Intercepts lies about the Clinton Foundation, their focus on the source of funds rather than where the funds actually ended up (yup, that’s right, Glenn, not a single investigative piece on the true work the foundation has accomplished) and then his innuendo-like championing of the “non interventionist” policies of Mr. Trump (oh, yes, occasionally, just to cover his true point of view, Glenn tweeted something negative about Mr. Trump to demonstrate that he really didn’t much approve of all the racism after all), all of this and more led to the election of Donald Trump. (Sorry, Glenn, your hands are bloody as Sean Hannity’s)

Once every semblance of civil liberties, of human decency is leveled, do you think Glenn will ever come out and admit that he was wrong about Mr. Trump? The odds of that are the same odds that Donald Trump will come out and admit he’s a pathological liar. It’s called malignant narcissism.

Well done, Mr. Greenwald, the entire world is terrified, I called hundreds and hundreds of minorities leading up to the election and they were terrified then, especially those Muslims you claim to champion. Just think of all the good work your billionaire funded website did in pointing out the problems with big money in politics and your maligning and lying about Hillary Clinton.

Oh, lest we forget the point of this article, we Democrats do thank you, Mr. Putin, Sean Hannity, Mr. Trump and your other bedfellows for the good advice about how to run a campaign of the people. You’re really an upstanding citizen with your finger on the pulse and champion of the disenfranchised.

Here’s the question for you Glenn–once Mr. Trump decides he doesn’t like your point of view, once indefinite detention for you as it surely will, will you have the guts to speak “the truth” then? And if so who will be your dog sitter? I’d get that lined up right now. Trump is going to be coming for you.

Glenn tweeted something negative about Mr. Trump to demonstrate that he really didn’t much approve of all the racism after all), all of this and more led to the election of Donald Trump.

Three points:

1) People like you who keep claiming that I never criticized Trump, or did so only rarely to prove I would, are simply lying. There’s no other word for it.

2) I don’t work for the DNC or the Clinton campaign. It’s not my job to elect Democrats. If I wanted to work for that goal, I’d go work for one of those entities – or Vox or Media Matters or MSNBC or something. Our job is to show facts and shine light on powerful people, and we did that, and did it extremely well, with regard to both Clinton and Trump. We didn’t create the Intercept to serve the Democratic Party so I haven’t spent time asking if we served that goal because that’s not our goal collectively nor mine as a journalist.

3) Claiming that the reason Dems lost in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio is because of what I tweeted or we reported not only requires extreme stupidity, but also perfectly illustrates the pathology I wrote about in this article.

C’mon Glenn, a “real journalists” job is to clap louder for the anointed Democratic party candidate during an ongoing election, and keep all your little critiques of his/her past, policies, potential conflicts of interest, thoughts on his/her tactics . . . to yourself. Because you know what, you’re so All Powerful Glenn Greenwald that the slightest utterance from your lips or words typed into your keyboard sways the minds of 60 million voters in any given election.

Hahahahahahaha . . . “also perfectly illustrates the pathology I wrote about in this article” is exactly right.

The people critiquing you don’t understand the first thing about the role of journalism in a free country, nor do they want to. They just want you to clap louder, and if you can’t do that, keep quiet or attack their foe.

I’m the first to admit the USA is in a very precarious place right now. But if the hard core partisans and party apparatchiks flying the D next to their names, don’t want to address what’s at issue here for whatever reason, then step aside and let others try something new.

The proof is in the pudding and 32 state legislatures and governorships all over the country. I’m sorry that hurts their professional or personal pride, but it is fuck, fight or hit the fence time as far as I’m concerned.

Glenn, Your work was done through innuendo, for example suggesting that Trump’s adoration of the journalist killer Putin was a good thing since the US and Russia would get along. You forgot to mention what getting along would mean to the rest of the world. You made sure to cover up those innuendo by mentioning here and there that Trump was problematic, as your link indicates, you start out by saying how uninspiring the Dem’s are. You never did spend any time in a place called South Philly and seen exactly how inspired so many people were. Nor did you speak to Hispanics all over the country and hear what they had to say.

Basically, you and various writers at The Intercept worked through false equivalency, the same way that NPR and The NY Times became complicit with the right over and over. Yes, you and the NYTimes writers such as Amy Chozick were quite well aligned.

I was a fan of yours. Indeed, you brought out the ultra right wing policies and the normalization of those policies by Mr. Obama right away in 2009 after giving him a brief grace period, especially the racist drone program that he and his cronies promoted. It wasn’t lefty cool to criticize POTUS and yet you did that, including your 2013 article about the appointment of right wing Bushie Mr. Comey with his sordid past. You stood up for Muslims, not in this election.

I don’t give a damn about Hillary Clinton, she’s a media figurehead. This is not personal. Back in early 2009 when my wife and I donated enough money to Democracy Now! to have dinner with Amy Goodman, in part because she would have you on her show frequently, we looked into many charities to give to after getting a pile of cash by a corporate accounting mistake from freelance work. We decided to give it all away instead of give it back. We gave it away to Doctor’s Without Borders and multiple other charities and later a boatload of it to Wikileaks. Back then, we spent a lot of time researching charities. One of those charities that came up repeatedly was the Clinton Foundation. We didn’t give a penny to them, we figured they had enough money in their coffers from people like your funder, Omydar. Besides Wikileaks was getting started, Manning was tossed in jail and so we funded them, dumping the rest of our funds the next year on them by routing our money through various friends since we felt we would be targeted if we gifted too much.

No, you didn’t shine the light on Trump and Clinton as you claim here. And no, you shouldn’t be proud of it. Here’s what slanted journalism is all about, Glenn: you and the NYTimes and Fox News repeatedly covered the source of funds to the foundation without a single story about where they ultimately ended up, unless of course it involved some mistaken program. That’s how false equivalency journalism accomplishes its ultimate goal. It’s no different than any other form of propaganda and you were guilty of it, as guilty as the grotesque NPR and NYTimes elite which will now normalize Trump, especially if there is a major terrorist attack. Covering where those fund ended up wouldn’t fit into what only could be your personal disdain for the Clintons. You put the personal over your own principles. Maybe you could have compared the money Mr. Trump’s family “donated” to Africa to put a bullet into the head of an elephant to the money the Clintons put into Africa. Maybe you should have compared those two, side by side. Maybe you should have interviewed one or two AIDs victims there and noted if they believe they were “equivalent.” That story would “shined the light” on the truth but it didn’t serve your purposes.

To end this on a less nasty note. I have very much appreciated the work you’ve done for years, just not this past year. Thank you for that.

Glenn, Your work was done through innuendo, for example suggesting that Trump’s adoration of the journalist killer Putin was a good thing since the US and Russia would get along. You forgot to mention what getting along would mean to the rest of the world.

Wow, how many countries is the USA currently militarily engaged in bombing, or aiding some nation or faction who is compared to Russia? About 7 to 2 roughly.

And you think trying to having a less adversarial relationship with Russia, would do what? Lessen the number of nations the USA is bombing or facilitating the bombing of, or increase Russia’s bombing of some nations of their own?

Or do the nations America is bombing or helping to bomb not count as part of “the rest of the world”?

You can’t write your way out of a paper bag so how do you expect anyone to read your lengthy bilge? You’re barely intelligible.

As far as the NYT goes, you obviously don’t read it as they were constantly bashing Trump and ended up endorsing Hillary, as did the WaPo. Admit it, you’re a partisan who expects Glenn to play follow-the-leader.

1) The claim you never criticize Trump IS a lie. But as the comment says, you haven’t published a single article which focus was Trump, or the Republican party, or in which you expose them in anywhere near the same zeal for depth and details as you did in exposing Clinton and the Democrats.

2) If exposing Trump is “work for the DNC or the Clinton campaign”, logic (not to mention common decency) dictates that exposing Clinton and the DNC is working for Trump and the Republicans. So, Glenn, why are you working for a proto-fascist (Jill Stein’s words to describe Trump)?

3) You are being far too modest. While it would be difficult to quantify, do you really think yours, and others’ similar publications, have not turned a single voter against Clinton?. You say The Intercept “reported”, but you yourself acknowledge the media does far more than that. Moreover, the omission of voter suppression from the list of reasons for Trump’s victory above is telling, but more importantly, it goes far beyond mere reporting – by ignoring the most central allegation against Republicans you self-servingly attempt to strengthen you repeated claim: that the DNC and Clinton have only themselves to blame. None of the links attached to the mentioned list blames exclusively. Perhaps you should also consider rejecting a single-source explanation of such a complex and many-faceted event.

Do you really think that the readers here are naïve enough to buy your holy Clinton Foundation “Correct The Record Troll” type banal propaganda? The Clinton’s unquenchable thirst for monetary rewards in the likes Wall Street speaking fees, and corrupting campaign contributions is bad enough, but the Clinton Foundation turnstile chicanery is a new amoral low even for the likes of them.

It is not very reassuring that the Clinton Foundation once approaching a trillion dollars in value only source to tell us that they are legit is the same type source, which acted criminally in their reporting regarding the mortgage scandal, which brought down the world economy.

This whole foundation schema is not illegal only because criminals in the likes of Boehner, who passed Tobacco campaign contribution checks on the floor of Congress to his colleges in corruption, historically write their amoral laws.

Come on The rich have been using the ploy of their Foundations to ensure their stocks values remain in a stable inflated state, avoid paying their fair share of taxes, ensure they can take full advantage of the incredible time value of money in order to be able to pass their wealth and power on to their own, and be able to use their ever growing wealth base to buy off corruptible politicians and judges until the end of time.

The Clinton Foundation is just more of the banal evil exhibited by the foundation farce perpetrated upon the American people.

The Clinton Foundation building of soccer fields in devastated countries when a source of water supply, sewage, housing, and many other basics are needed for survival hardly builds your case that the Clintons are saviors. And FYI not a Trump supporter, not ignorant, and not led by the nose by the type of misinformation you spew out.

Even if one might naively believe that the Clinton Foundation exists for noble purposes the fact that it exists is wrong, because you should not be collecting money that may be close to trillion dollars in value if you are in office, or planning a run for the Presidency.

Doing that irresponsibly and justifiably shakes the public faith in the system along with making it possible to both elect the likes of a Trump, and be the cause of a revolution.

A revolution could be bloody, and actually place mankind in a new kind of darker “Dark Age”, because this time the lights could go out due to environmental or nuclear catastrophe.

I’d say that Trump winning the Presidency is the worst thing that could have happened for Glenn’s style of journalism.

Specifically, many media outlets will be heavily scrutinizing the Trump presidency. But since Glenn acts as a media “corrective,” that is virtually eliminated as an option. In other words, it will be hard for Glenn to be a contrarian when you have a sleazeball like Trump as President. Therefore, I think we’re in store for a boatload of articles revolving around hypocrisy, forced efforts to draw comparisons between Trump and Obama, and pointing out delicious ironies.

It should be lots of fun.

And speaking of apologizing and accountability, how about TI commissioning a report on its substandard coverage of the 2016 Presidential election? Maybe include a clear-eyed assessment of how “corrective” journalism worked out, since you were all so sure Hillary had this thing in the bag.

If Glenn is willing to share his Twitter feed follower numbers, and The Intercept’s metrics for how many unique IP addresses click onto Glenn’s work, I’ll give you 3 to 1, max bet $100, that Glenn’s readership and Twitter followers both increase over the next two years in the aggregate (i.e the average number of unique followers and readers will go up).

I have no interest in estimating the size of Glenn’s fan club on Twitter.

My comment was not suggesting that his anticipated content would be detrimental to his following. Hell, he could post a picture of some poo and his most ardent sycophants would be here immediately gushing about its unbelievable texture and size.

But since Glenn acts as a media “corrective,” that is virtually eliminated as an option.

I don’t think “media corrective” means what you think it means. At least not with respect to Glenn Greenwald’s work and whether or not it will be “virtually eliminated as an option”. Hell the vast majority of the mainstream media is right now spinning itself into a pretzel trying to normalize Trump.

They’ll be plenty for Glenn to work with, trust me. And if you don’t trust me, then I’d suggest putting your money behind your opinion at the odds I’m giving just to make it interesting.

I’d say that Trump winning the Presidency is the worst thing that could have happened for Glenn’s style of journalism.

I began my journalism career, and built my platform, when George Bush and Dick Cheney were running pretty much everything. Plenty of liberal outlets were spewing hatred at them daily. But my primary focus was on the parts of their destructive agenda that Dems and liberals largely avoided (civil liberties assaults, ); media timidity; and Democratic collaboration. I’m certain there will be all sorts of events in those categories.

Beyond that, there are all kinds of fascinating re-alignments and challenges to the status quo order that the Trump presidency will usher in. Your failure to think about them and anticipate them – and your inability to think outside tiny narrow boxes – says a huge amount about you and nothing about me or the journalism we are positioning ourselves to do.

Glenn, how nice of you to not only validate my point, but double down on your myopic “corrective” methodology.

Your failure to think about them and anticipate them – and your inability to think outside tiny narrow boxes – says a huge amount about you and nothing about me or the journalism we are positioning ourselves to do.

Says the guy whose last several months of Presidential election reporting was predicated on a Clinton victory:

I see my role as being a corrective to whatever consensus emerges that I don’t think is being subjected to enough critical scrutiny. Just pushing back against that is the most you can hope to do as a journalist, against unquestioned assumptions embedded within the conventional wisdom. I am not a political prognosticator, but I always thought and still think that the chances are overwhelmingly high that Hillary is going to be the next president. I always thought that and still think that. So when I think about the outcome, and what the ultimate result is going to be, I generally look past that, and think about things that can be accomplished before that, or things that can be accomplished once that happens.

This calculus utterly blew up in your face. Your TI reporting didn’t foreshadow any of Trump’s “fascinating re-alignments and challenges” because you explicitly ignored the possibility of a Trump presidency. You wanted to get ahead of the curve on the supposedly inevitable Clinton presidency and in the process gave Trump a free pass. I remember you decrying the media for not taking Trump serious after the primaries, but what about you!? Add that to one of your future hypocrisy articles. Now that the smoke has cleared, there are a lot of journalists out there that can say they did their part in forewarning us about the dangers of Trump. You are simply not one of them.

You talk about media timidity but I cannot think of anybody that was more timid than you during the Presidential election cycle. A perfect example was when you were asked during a video interview if Hillary Clinton was the lesser of two evils. You looked like a deer caught in the headlights. After inhaling the oxygen out of the room, you spent 10 full seconds rambling instead of responding to this very simple and predictable question. This was reflected in your TI articles. Your most ardent readership was utterly convinced that Clinton was either equal to or worse than Trump, yet you refused to chime in on this obvious issue. You knew damn well that Trump was a “sort of unique evil” (your words) and a much more alarming risk than Clinton. But you were too afraid to make this clear because it could compromise your ideological purity. If you consistently stated that Clinton was better than Trump warts and all, you risked being labeled a shill and pissing off your horde of Twitter followers. Now that Trump is filling his adviser and cabinet positions with a who’s who list of regressive, anti-Islamic, anti-privacy slime-balls, I wonder if you have any regrets?

If you consistently stated that Clinton was better than Trump warts and all, you risked being labeled a shill and pissing off your horde of Twitter followers.

Sincerely, why in any way should Glenn or any journalist be taking a position on which candidate is “better” than another in any given election? Now you could rightly argue that as an “advocacy journalist” (which isn’t exactly how I think Glenn would describe himself, generally speaking, but rather like all humans/journalists someone with personal preferences and biases that should be disclosed to readers of his/her work) maybe he should have taken a position one way or the other.

But there is nothing wrong with Glenn taking no side, so long as what he reports is factually accurate. You and any other, can challenge the arguments, or the meaning or quality of the “facts” he cites, on the merits at your discretion. But what does that have to do with any affirmative obligation on Glenn’s part as a journalist to make a “personal” or “professional” endorsement of a candidate as a function of his work? I don’t get it. Lots of journalists don’t take a position one way or the other–are you in their comment threads making the same argument to them that you are to Glenn? If not why not? Do you think Glenn is so much more influential that there is some greater onus on him to do so given the size of his platform? If so make that case on the merits and then apply it consistently because pretty sure lots of mainstream print and tv journalists have a lot more “influence” over the American public than Glenn does.

Now that Trump is filling his adviser and cabinet positions with a who’s who list of regressive, anti-Islamic, anti-privacy slime-balls, I wonder if you have any regrets?

Again, see above. Why should Glenn have any regrets if he didn’t affirmatively vote for Trump or didn’t knowing disseminate factual falsehoods about Hillary Clinton?

You have always struck me as a pretty smart guy and we’ve had some pretty I think productive discussions in the past. But I’m mystified by how logically or otherwise you could be blaming or insinuating that Glenn has culpability for what happened this election. Seriously I’d be interested in your explanation why you think that is appropriate to put on Glenn.

The Republicans will not stand still. As their demographic base keeps eroding, they will pivot to win more Hispanic votes, further solidify the Trump coalition, and put new obstacles in the way of Democrats turning out their vote. It’s not that difficult to run against the current Democratic Party, which identifies so strongly with society’s most successful that it effectively adopts a winner-takes-all attitude towards economic success — and since this includes those who succeed in the military-industrial complex, it has made the Democrats into a pro-war party all too happy to turn the children of the lower and middle classes into cannon fire in the name of the American empire and the economic interests that control it.
The weakness of the Democratic is easily analyzed. It has done everything possible to shrink the difference between itself and the Republicans on economics and foreign/security policy so that it is as now as much a neoliberal neoconservative party as the Republicans. To maintain its appeal to its base, it therefore doubled down on identity politics offering the minorities honeyed words but little else. This identity politics has now reached such absurd lengths of political correctness that it turns off ever more gettable voters, not only white but minorities disgusted as well (everyone is prejudiced somewhat, no one is perfect).
The Sanders message voiced effectively by new, younger blood is a top priority. Also, a party-wide refusal to accept money from Wall Street, the Military-Industrial Complex, and Big Energy needs to be instituted (there is still plenty of other money out there). And activists need to start now by urging Senate Democrats to filibuster Energy and EPA candidates who deny the scientific consensus on global warming, who back policies likely to lead to new wars, and so on.

You can probably figure out on your own that the 100-page report didn’t spontaneously appear, but took much time, which means they began fairly close to the election. Indeed, they resolved to perform the autopsy in December.

Second, even Breitbart types said very early on there were huge flaws in the GOP that needed fixing – they didn’t sit around blaming the media, party critics, and anyone else the could find.

Third, I explicitly said that it’s early and that there’s still time, but the whole point of what I wrote is that Dems are moving in the wrong direction: every day, they find a new scapegoat and move further and further away from accepting responsibility.

The reality is that you made your whole point based on this 16-month math error of yours, and then rather admit that the 4-month gap destroyed your point, you decided to pretend it stood.

No, your point doesn’t stand. You think that the Republicans wrote their “autopsy” in 1 day? They were certainly working on it from the moment they so badly lost the election, not blaming everyone but themselves for their election debacle.

No, your point doesn’t stand. You think that the Republicans wrote their “autopsy” in 1 day?

No, they apparently wrote it in 4 months.

It has been 10 days since the election. Last year the DNC issued a “Final Report and Action Plan” that in part addressed its 2014 midterm losses. Why Glenn and other don’t think the DNC would do something similar for the 2016 election is beyond me. I’d bet that after they select the DNC chair, a similar postmortem will be commissioned, if it hasn’t already.

That’s not the “similar” Glenn is talking about, just the undertaking of an autopsy report. The “similar” thing is “unflinching in its self-critique”. That 2014 autopsy apparently was clueless.

And they continued to show they have no fucking clue by replacing Wasserman Schultz with freaking Donna Brazile [btw when I heard news of DWS’ resignation, my mind immediately went “oh god it’s going to be Brazile. That’s how predictable these dumbfuck insular party establishment morons are.]

Then just now showed again no clue by replacing Reid with Schumer.

Let’s just assume two things from your reference to the DNC chair depending on who gets it:

1. If Howard Dean, the postmortem will not be “unflinching in its self-critique” (unless after it’s completed they oust Dean since one of the conclusion is “don’t elect establishment status quo folks as party chair, or ones with corruption such as lobbying for a foreign terrorist organization, fucking duh”)

2. If Keith Ellison, the postmortem might be honest/unflinching, at least if the reason he’s chosen is a reflection of more awareness of the Party’s faults. If they elect him for that I hope he laws down the law and is as un-token like as possible.

So far the DNC has shown zero signs it’s learned anything about this election result, choosing to blame everything except for its systemic, utter failures and its pushing for a terrible, out-of-step candidate.

Hope the deflection strategy continues and the Democrats stay out of power for decades. The answer to the question “Did Obama do a good job?” could not have been more clearly answered than by this election. Although he completed the Iran deal, began a rapprochement with Cuba, passed the ACA (which some people like), and seemingly orchestrated a recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression, there is nothing else nice to say about his presidency. ACA has been a disaster for all but 6% of the population, ISIS captured the Tigris and is still not completely defeated, somehow we fell right back into the cold war with failed policies in the ME and Eastern Europe, the fiscal situation has never been worse nor has a president ever spent what Obama did, war crimes are codified in law by a constitutional scholar no less, including extrajudicial assassination, rendition, torture, and purposeful targeting of civilian targets like MSF. Meanwhile, domestically, the country is on the verge of a civil war, egged on by Obama with idiotic forays into the disputes. Trayvon could have been his son and all, not being Yemeni. And scarcely anyone is satisfied with the “recovery” featuring labor force participation still 7% below 2006. Liberals that still defend Obama are either ignorant or disingenuous or both. He didn’t help the poor, minorities, the ME, or anything else he promised, and if you still defend him, you’re not a liberal, you’re a moron.

Good point, Nate. Look at the polls, not the election — what could go wrong? Or just ask Obama himself: “… I will consider it [a Trump victory] a personal insult, an insult to my legacy…”

And the data are clear! Obama’s only twelve points lower than when he took office! A full 5% higher than W’s approval rating from the same source, and we all know how great he was! Also, 60% have an unfavorable view of Trump, so there’s no way he’ll win! Nate, you’re so right! Look at the survey data! Fuck reality!

So who on the left understands the signal sent by the election? Obama and Glenn do. Not Nate.

rrheard: you are completely lost. I brought up the popular vote to refute the Macroman’s claim that the outcome spoke to whether “Obama did a good job.” Not to whine about the electoral college. Try to keep up, this isn’t complicated.

Nate, you’re right, it isn’t complicated. If the contest was for the popular vote, the campaigns would have been different, with Trump in NYC rather than Minnesota, and he would have won that. Since you can so easily identify “trash,” the lesson of this election is that HRC and the Obama-third-term platform were trash, and, on the merits, the Obama admin is trash, as evidenced by the election of a clown instead of his policies’ continuation.

So now you’re suggesting the question of whether “Obama did a good job” is a function of the “popular vote” in this election?

Well I’d argue this in response if you can keep up, proof positive that you do a good job (as a POTUS and party) is something to be evaluated on the merits of your policy achievements (which is largely a legislative function not the executive) and your electoral success following your POTUS’ tenure in office (as he/she and that party usually is held responsible, good or bad, in the next elections).

Now I personally believe in some ways Pres. Obama was a fair president, and in others horrible. Many others across America do not believe he was a fair president (rightly or wrongly, rational or irrational, fact based or bigotry based).

But I guarantee you if the electoral consensus all across the country was that the Democratic Party and Pres. Obama had done a just super job, and Hillary Clinton a worthy heir apparent to that legacy you wouldn’t have seen the electoral slaughter we’ve been witnessing all across the land (with a few exceptions) over the last 20 years.

The Democratic party, as a function of polling on issues it supports (other than free trade, foreign wars, and a couple of other discrete issues), enjoys a fairly overwhelming majority of support amongst the American public for their policy proposals if framed and sold the correct way.

They can’t seem to figure out how to do that, and that’s why they lose. They lose because they aren’t credible in the vast majority of the American people’s eyes on the issue that is first and foremost of the utmost importance to all most all human beings–the economy and their individual financial well-being.

And that’s because the Democratic party has been selling them out (just like the GOP) for decades.

Fix that perception or reality, and the Dems start winning elections going away for decades all across America. It isn’t fucking rocket science.

People aren’t stupid. Only self-absorbed partisan apparatchiks, disconnected academics, self-interested pollsters, election consultants etc. etc. and party elites are. Or they don’t really want to make the changes necessary to start winning consistently that have been staring them in the face for decades.

It’s one or the other, and I’d argue it’s a bit of both, otherwise they’d be doing something different.

There is a vast sea of delusional souls or paid operatives trying to prevent the Democratic party from making the changes they need to make.

They aren’t just finger pointing in misdirection.
They are spewing lies to “substantiate” their claims.
They are claiming to know the unknowable.
They are bullying any who dare contradict their efforts.
And they are using every outlet and tool available to them.

Is it a conspiracy theory to point out these actions seem like an organized effort that goes well beyond an unwillingness to face up to personal failures?
Is Big Money buying this post-election non-autopsy the way they bought the election?

In this particular case, the old adage of “Don’t assume malice before incompetence” applies well.

The DNC is acting exactly like a lot of places I’ve worked when the upper management became overly top-heavy with incompetent idiots and then something bad happened: blame-shifting and scrambling around trying to dodge the inevitable blowback. This is usually followed by a change in leadership and a lot of people getting walking papers, although how well the changes work out depend on how well the new people understand the underlying causes of failure from the previous administration.

However, keeping the Democratic party in the hands of Big Money is literally worth trillions of dollars to them.
An organized PR effort is certainly a possibility, and if you look around any of the Dem echo chambers, the same talking points are being used again and again.

Presuming incompetence is underestimating the greed and intelligence of those who could stand to lose from a Democratic party that serves the people.

That said, my comment was in the form of a question for a reason… no evidence beyond the pattern visible.

But I think it may be important for as large a group of people to keep the possibility I mentioned in mind in case solid evidence emerges. Not looking for it guarantees none will be found. It’s unlikely a whistleblower will emerge, but loose lips are possible.

I would hope that journalists (hint hint GG and gang) start challenging the Dem establishment at every opportunity when their denial and false excuses for failure are trotted out.
I don’t mean columns like this, I mean active journalism asking direct questions of elected Dems and seeking quotes for stories on the real issues that caused the loss. I suspect TI journalists won’t be warmly embraced, but Dem refusals to comment should then be reported instead. There are also a couple of journalists here who may not be suitable for such work.

The democratic party got ambushed by Republicans whose members in intelligence agencies helped to leak damaging information. If information of leading Republican politicians were leaked they wouldn’t be any better.
There is nothing the Democrats could do about an unprecedented dog whistling urging whites (73% of the US population) to take back their country from minorities (one being president) and a lot of immigrants. A woman couldn’t do that job. It’s true Democrats need more self criticism but the arguments they are giving for their loss are valid too.
Now that the people have spoken and they want the Presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate and the House of Representatives under the control of one party let their wish be. Maybe a quasi mono-party system heading to similar governments as Russia and China will make America great again.

“RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called Mitt Romney’s loss “a wake-up call,” and he was scathing about his party’s failures: “there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement . . . So, there’s no one solution: There’s a long list of them.”

It takes a lot of courage to admit mistakes hence defeat and therefore do better next time. But do better in what? Duping the masses yet once again into believing the Republicans really care about all Americans and especially those suffering the most?
It seems to me that no matter how many ways the Democrats and Republicans sway their voters, it’s the voters who get shafted time and time again yet fail to realize that both parties are a sham, and utter insult to humanity. Those rejoicing over Trump’s win are in for a bitter disappointment because the problems we face today are far greater than even our most astute in sociology, psychology, and foreign policy.
So here go again with another 4 years of drama, dysfunction, gridlock, and madness. We do this so many times and have not yet learned our lesson. It’s like a dysfunctional marriage and we all end up getting sucked into it unknowingly.

Usually I’m a big fan of Mr. Greenwald, but I’m not sure what the point is of this particular piece? As has been noted, the Republican Party’s good hard look at itself seems to have done no good whatsoever. So what’s the point in encouraging the Dems. toward introspection? Probably a futile exercise, even if we were to waste the time in waiting for/hoping for it to happen. In my opinion the entire duopoly is beyond repair, and needs to be destroyed so that we can start anew behind parties that truly represent We the People–not the Oligarchy.

1) Get the corporate Blairite Clintonite Democrats to hand over power at the DNC to Sanders supporters, and institute fundamental DNC reforms – eliminate the superdelegates, set a fixed number of Democratic primary debates, and reform state laws to allow independents to vote in the Democratic primary. The practice of corporate elites handpicking Democratic candidates has to end.

2) Support populist movements like the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors, who are facing opposition from both Trump and Obama, both of whom seem to want to push it through for the benefit of big donors like billionaire Warren Buffett (who has $6 billion in Phillips 66, the Energy Transfer Partners partner in the Dakota Pipeline, and who campaigned with Hillary Clinton) and Kelcy Warren, the Energy Transfer Partners CEO who donated $100,000 to Donald Trump (who himself has at least $500,000 invested in ETP). That’s a real test case of elite wealth vs. the interests of average Americans.

After all, the real reason Trump won is that the DNC and the Clintons and Obama and the corporate media all backed Wall Street’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, over the populist Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders. The rigging of the primary in Hillary Clinton’s favor is pretty obvious; Just compare Obama vs. Clinton 2008 to Sanders vs. Clinton 2016:

1) DNC sponsors 26 primary debates in 2008; only 9 in 2016. After every one, Sanders gets more popular as his message resonates with the public – so DNC shuts down the debates.

3) Wikileaks revealed extensive collaboration between the DNC and the Clinton campaign to undermine Sanders, including an effort to label Bernie a “Jewish atheist”.

4) Independent voters were prevented from registering Democratic months in advance of the election in many states to prevent them from voting for Sanders.

That all amounts to contempt for the voting public, which is characteristic for politicians funded by elite interests; but let’s be honest, our actual system of government in the U.S. today is much closer to oligarchy or plutocracy than to true democracy.

Maybe I’m reading what you wrong incorrectly; but the way you worded it, it seemed like Repulicans needed stunning loss after stunning loss before they were finally willing to do some introspection. It seems like this is the first big BIG loss for Democrats, so the fact that they are still in denial shouldn’t shock anyone. It’s only been a little over a week. I hope they are able to get past it quickly though and make the changes they need to be successful again.

I did not see anywhere that the republican strategy was to let an outsider steal the nomination. Yet he did with the establishment screaming in pain all the way. I think he even helped to elect other repub candidates, probably including some who hate him.

Nor did that self blaming therapy session change the party significantly. They just got lucky, while still spouting the same nonsense.

Perhaps the Dems should have “let an outsider steal the nomination.”
Instead they went with a tainted establishment candidate this go-round.
She lost to an outsider in ’08. Did they think ’16 would be different?

What evidence do you have that voters made their decisions based on sexism or misogyny?” he asked.

“I think one of the things we never really had a conversation about– but again, I think going forward we should talk about– is how this country, how people feel about women in power,” Finney repeated.

“Some of my colleagues won’t like this, but I think even in the primary, some of what we saw with the Bernie Bros had a real chilling effect on a lot of women, and young women in particular,” she argued.

When you read what the Hillary supporters are saying it makes you feel sorry for the writers at The Onion, because these people are beyond parody. I was a Bernie supporter and voted for Jill Stein, but somehow I’m a sexist and a racist who doesn’t care about anyone but myself.

An alcoholic usually won’t seek help until reaching rock bottom. The Democrats haven’t yet reached rock bottom. They can keep telling their big Wall Street donors that the Trump administration will fall flat on its face, followed by “we’re not Trump, we’re professionals.” So basically, the Democratic party won’t really change until AFTER it loses big in mid-term elections two years from now and the big donors flee for good. Until then all our “grassroots” and Bernie insurgency can count on being ignored and marginalized and fought off just like it was during the primaries. If the Dems do make gains in mid-terms or Trump ends up as a one term president, you can bet that whatever deregulatory gifts he’s given to Wall Street the Dems will let it stay exactly the way he left it.

The article “How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul” from The Atlantic was a good read into how the Democrats got into this horrible position. The neoliberal idiots leading the party need to get removed from leadership and we need to get the people who know what life is really like on the ground and have ideas to fix it in.

Your points are well-taken, and I agree with many of them. However, my take is slightly different: Republicans post-2012 and Democrats post-2016 are essentially mirror images of one another. After Romney, the key takeaway is that Republicans had to change substantive parts of their platform to appeal to a broader and more diverse constituency. After Clinton, Democrats should change their messaging, especially toward the white working class, to reflect and emphasize their more economic populist leanings.

It’s true that Clinton herself had some flaws that doomed her candidacy, which you enumerate in your article. But as I’ve been saying this entire campaign to friends and colleagues, she also ran on one of the most progressive platforms for a major-party candidate in modern history. Paid family leave? Raising the minimum wage to $12? Adding a public option to Obamacare? This stuff wasn’t even on the table 4 years ago. And if Clinton had emphasized these elements of her platform, instead of getting dragged into the mud by Trump so often, it’s quite likely that she could have at least blunted his advantage with working-class whites, and perhaps even expanded her lead with other key demographics. Obviously this is all 20/20 hindsight, but I think the fact that Trump could co-opt the populist label in contravention of all available evidence that his policies would hurt working people points to a major messaging failure in the Democratic party that they’ll have to rectify if they want to cobble together winning coalitions going forward.

A rather disingenuous article, given that the Russians all out admitted to have interfered and as such, any comparisons with the loss by the Republican party before is comparing apples and oranges. Not to mention that the outcome of that “introspection” has been a complete and unmitigated disaster for the GOP – even if it gave them the presidency with a candidate they didn’t want themselves.

As for the supposed “empirical evidence” supporting Sanders, it’s cute that Greenwald relies on the very same polls predicting a Clinton win before the ACTUAL election. Primaries are a very different beast.

Thank you, and any mentally healthy being or organization does this routinely, or at least post difficulties.
CPowell said it correctly: hrc destroys anything she touches. And with hubris– i would say pride!
That kind of a person does that in your entourage, familial, friends or workplace does not last long.
This person simply destroys others to get ahead bc s/he has no accomplishments of her/his own. Not even a LibbeyLight!
All the energy and intelligence is spent on Peopling– who knows what, where, how, etc.
Whether you agree with SenSanders is not important but he is a bright example of the exact opposite of what CrookdClinton is.
PresBill took over the Dem party– as Xpotusa, he simply could not be denied. He took control through hrc– all this took more than one person to accomplish, but only he had the intelligence, experience, and resources to orchestrate and guide her.
Hrc as Potusa would have also been a feather in his hat.

The Foundation was set up as a secret undercurrent way of accessing funds in exchange for SOS power. Everything was planned. Many thought a joint Obama/Clinton ticket as the sure outcome.
But a VPusa is mostly concerned with the domestic, and has to work in concert with the Potusa. But a SOS can travel the world and just checks in. The non-exposure of the SOS is due to the nature of the duty.
Obama was in on it as the 3rd one, bc CrookClintonWS connexions seemed to provide for him the surety of a glowing legacy!
Not knowing you have an appointee using unsecured email for four years and using a pseudo is unprofessional at best. It has the whole world laughing at the thought of ‘Legacy’?
The Oath is taken to the Constitution and SOS is well-paid. ‘Personal’ is not a consideration except for limited necessities. Hrcextrapolating on the Personal did is downright embarrassing and would not be accepted as an excuse by even a young adult. Even KimKardashian knows better!

The clintonemail.com was to talk to criminals. Period. Everyone got it.
FbiComey did what came across his desk in a timely manner. His boss is the AGTarmachLynch. His Oath is also to the Constitution and no one else.

CrookdClintons have no class, once someone has accessed the WH, they usu gratefully acknowledge their blessings and decide to take of their time to now share with others.
PresBill could have volunteered with the RedCross or any other charities and he would have been more than welcome! but no, instead he set himself up as rival, drained much needed funds that were returned to CrookdClintonFoundation in hopes of some under the table SOS favors.
And their bank accounts and real-estate holdings evidence this.
Hrc ‘Public-Private is a Lie defined. Yes, everyone has public and private opinions, but they are not that!
Also age came in fast for Hrc: doing well in 2008 and 2013, is not where you will be a few years later at the end of your 7th decade of life. As my grandma used to say “Now the years add up doubled!” Hows and whys matter not much– it simply is.
Though you may have many resources, present ‘well’, at the end of the day your DISHONESTY just oozed out for all to see.

While I concur with your general position, I think it’s also fair to say that it has only been a week.
I would rather that the Democrats take the long road to the correct conclusions than, as did the GOP in 2012, say all the right things publicly and then continue to act in the same old way.

Errr, why not ask for the whole loaf!!! Why not ask Obama to close Guantanamo, and maybe announce that he no longer believes in spying on everyone, indefinite detention without trial and targeting his own citizens for assassination!!!!

Honestly, what’s the hurry? Just ask Trump to do it in two months!!

What’s that? Trump hasn’t shown many signs that he is at all interested in doing that???

(this is where the lightbulb should go on over people’s heads)

You can’t pressure, Obama to end the empire, any more than you can pressure Bernie Sanders to become a Wall Street lobbyist.

Perhaps we eventually need a top-post on how to form party or elevate existing third parties to electable status – one that is truly more representative of the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans – say 67%+ – think Venn Diagram. If that’s even possible.

While we seem to swing from extremes between Dems and Repubs at some common denominator the Dems and Repubs are still different sides of the same coin – or million dollar bill I suppose.

Probably needs to start at the local level, but it does hurt my head to think about it as I am no great deep thinker.

I hope it does not require a Civil War II with violence – certainly no more than we see today – of sorts.

Blacks went through a lot to get the vote, so they won’t give it up easily. But the Republicans would never have won without voter suppression, they know it, they know that blacks don’t vote for them, and they will have control of the Supreme Court and all those local districts. Therefore, I think that the black voters standing in line for hours and hours this year are just the tip of the iceberg — in 2018 we will see voters in line until dawn. By 2024 the multi-day voting lines will take on the look of a rebellion, and local police will have to make the tough decision to shoot some of them to restore order. I mean, any voters in line after a day or so really start to make democracy look bad.

The establishment democrats still think they won the election…..no reason to have self reflections on their lack of substance. They believe all it will take next time is a better candidate, not a change in attitude toward the “deplorables”.

At the level of everyday “political” common sense, the article is spot on.

The problem, as I see it, is that the Democratic Party, along with vast swathes of the so-called “liberal-left-progressive” electorate, have simply moved beyond “politics” as such and have entered the rarified atmosphere of unimpeachable ethical/moral superiority.

There are no more arguments, no more issues, nothing that “good people” could possibly disagree with. The Democratic Party and their friends in the media, and all across social media, know that if it weren’t for racists and sexists and other evil folks, their technocratic elite could be running a country that really would no longer require the messy business of electoral politics.

How do you look in the mirror and see anything but a victim of bad people and evil circumstance when your whole schtick is rooted in self-righteousness?

My problem is that I agree with pretty much everything these people stand for in terms of racial, ethnic and gender equality. I see these things as something we will have to fight for for a long time if not forever because I know that there are others, whose equality I also acknowledge, who disagree with me.

They are political enemies and must be fought with all the weapons of democratic politics.

Unfortunately, name-calling and taking the occasional sniff of a perfumed handkerchief while dismissing “them” as troglodytes and dinosaurs really isn’t going to cut it. But that is the confirmed worldview of many many people out there.

So there isn’t really anything to hope for from Democrats and their oh-so superior identitiarian ideologues.

We need a politics of the left.

And we need to start recognizing that the “liberal-left-progressive” wing of neoliberalism is just the moderate wing of the rightwing asshole gang that has taken over the world over the past 30 years or so.

My question is what do you want out of your government? What is going to make your life better? Is bombing Syria going to make your life better? Or is affordable education? Is invading Syria going to improve the life of Americans? Or is universal healthcare going to do that? Will overthrowing the Syrian government going to make a noticeable change in the lives of Americans? Or will, fixing roads and bridges, higher wages, the rich starting to pay taxes, make a noticeable change in most American lives?

Given the choice between ultra-rich, cut the taxes on the rich Trump, and Wall St darling Clinton, why is it so hard to understand that for many people, it makes no difference in their lives.

And just look at the people who are turning up to advise and work for Trump, take foreign policy for example. Henry Kissinger, who many consider a war criminal, one of Clinton’s mentors, is surprise surprise, visiting Trump Tower. And General Flynn, famous islamophobe, who worked for Obama, is, surprise surprise, visiting Trump Tower. So what’s the big deal?, as Obama says: don’t look backward! Why look backward when you’ve got so much continuity to look forward to!!! And don’t worry, I’m sure the corporate Democrats are perfectly capable of producing a “Trump-light” candidate next election.

Myself, I’d rather vote for someone who was more interested in fixing bridges, raising wages, giving me first-world healthcare etc. You don’t need Kissinger for that.

One other observation that hasn’t gotten much attention is that there is some good news in Trump’s win – that is that it evidenced the power of the people over the establishment. Both parties elite establishment power structures trotted out the very best they had to offer and yet the man with absolutely no entrenched, established political machinery won.

Of the people, by the people, and for the people still holds. Isn’t that actually great news?

Intercept is the greatest.
This article misses the point. Frankly, it’s very simple.
From a life long proud-to-be liberal democrat:
The Democratic Party morphed into the Republican Party.
The Republican Party raced into being a European styled super right wing Cult-of-Personality party. The “Autopsy” was meaningless and proved so.
The Democratic Party just has be, i. e. return to being, a party of the people and the protector of the sacred rights and well being of the people.
The Intercept can keep it on track.

It’s been particularly distressing to see Democrats railing against truth in their zeal to offload blame for the party’s failures onto others. Many of the reactions to Sarah Harrison’s op-ed in yesterday’s NYT blatantly suggested that truth and facts should be suppressed when they conflict with the agenda of those seeking power.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/why-the-world-needs-wikileaks.html)

The Democratic party deserved this, and as much as it might make me petty, I am reveling in them receiving their comeuppance. I sincerely hope that the party gets destroyed, and a real progressive party can fill the vacuum. Americans seem to attached to this two party system, but I feel now is as good a time as ever for the real progressives like Sanders and co to jump ship and start a new party. There is a huge progressive movement worldwide but the democratic establishment are doing their best to quash it before it can really gain any significant power.

Democrats need accept some blame, but in a DEMOCRACY the ELECTORATE decides and with that AUTHORITY comes RESPONSIBILITY.

I am super super super sick of listening to Americans say they are not responsible, because either you ARE in the greatest democracy ever and so you are responsible for the actions of your leaders, OR you WERE in the greatest democracy blah blah blah and let all that power slip away into the hands of dangerous sociopaths and vainglorious corporate whores – again, Guilty as Charged.

Back in 2008 I was working with lots of Americans, and the common consensus amongst them back then was “vote for Obama because he is half-black”. That was it, like being a member of a “minority” somehow gave him some extraordinary and beneficial wisdom. This, to me, is as racist as disregarding him because he is black. It does not treat him as a normal, fallible and sometimes inadequate human being with weaknesses and vices and prejudices like 99.999999999999999% of the rest of us (white, brown, yellow or red folk).

The same has been true for Clinton – “let’s make her the first woman in the White House!” Why? She’s a narcissistic idiot with a criminal husband.

You need to find someone capable of running the most powerful nation on Earth with around 300million native inhabitants and billions more reliant on its success.

In fact, I would go so far as to say the job is BEYOND any single human being, and that it would be far better to split the responsibilities and have the electorate vote on policies, not people, thus people may leave but the policy gets progressed nonetheless.

Trump’s win is a reaction both against Obama’s lies and failures to bring about the “Change” that he ran on and Clinton’s utter lack of any real policies beyond “being the first woman in the White House”. What next? The first gay couple? The first midget? The first Alpine Yodeller? WTF???

The White Male Right were never going to (openly) vote for Clinton, but they are – as they so rightly feel – a minority. Their vote is only part of Trump’s success. Women voted for Trump despite his misogyny, minorities voted for Trump despite his racism.

As an outsider I despise Obama, he is a total traitor to the people that wanted him to be the “half-black man” in the White House. To me he is an Uncle Tom to the corporate and military powerbrokers. He has presided over a dangerous period in history that he could’ve profoundly reworked and even reversed for the better. Instead we now have a greedy horny idiot who cannot control his mind when he loses his temper who will not “press the button” as people suggest, but he will be easily manipulated by the clever and dangerous people that will now surround him and make him theirs. Trump has NO IDEA of the overbearing power of the paranoia he will experience as he tries to keep his full grip on the reins of America.

My gut feeling to it is that Americans who want some sort of acceptable outcome from this insanity should mind those trying to control Trump as Trump himself. I think he is a braggart and charlatan who wants to drink the heady brew of power, but the men around him have far more dangerous intentions and should be beaten back into the darkness from where they came.

We are now at war against the insane concentration of power that the USA has become and I do not believe that many Americans are willing to accept that reality let alone take the next step and act against it.

– The USA’s denial of climate change is unacceptable and puts the whole world in greatest peril
– The USA as a Christian Theocracy is unacceptable
– The USA’s continued development of secret “trade agreements” designed to give US corporations power over foreign sovereign states is unacceptable
– The USA’s global “projection of power” and drone assassination campaigns are unacceptable
– The USA’s invasions of sovereign states and the execution of their leaders, slaughter of their peoples, and destructions of their economies is unacceptable
– The USA’s mass surveillance and storage of all digital data is unacceptable
– The USA’s scapegoating of rivals for political gain and profiteering is unacceptable
– The USA’s black ops, renditioning, torture and detention are unaceptable
– The USA’s Endless Wars on Terror and Drugs are unacceptable

There’s probably more, but that’s plenty to be getting on with.

I find it truly depressing looking back to 2008 and comparing the naive mood and the minimal lack of any policy discussion then to what I know now to have happened since through the insanely simplistic desire to “put a half-black man” in the White House.

It is not so much “Time to Wake Up”, more that the house is on fire and whether you are bothered or not is irrelevant. Some people just don’t care.

THE SELF-EXONERATING MENTALITY OF DEMOCRATS is particularly remarkable in light of how comprehensive their failures have been. After the 2012 election, the GOP immersed itself in unflinching self-critique even though it still held a majority in both houses of Congress and dominated governorships and state houses. By rather stark contrast, the Democrats have now been crushed at all levels of electoral politics, yet appear more self-righteously impressed with themselves, more vindicated in their messaging and strategic choices, than ever before.

This entire enterprise of blame the Democrat[ic] elite, airbrush the Republican elite fails on so many levels it’s laughable — except we now have the various clowns snapping whips at the caged menagerie.

Let’s start by avoiding partisan politics … oops, too late for that.

So let’s start by defining the Democrat[ic} elite and the Republican [elite] … oops, no need for that. We all know who they are, just ask Trump … or Greenwald.

So okay … where do we start?

Let’s talk about respective party messages … but wait, which message uttered by whom?

Whew … this is a difficult subject to undertake.

Instead of trying to decipher people, positions, and policies bundled under one or two political rubrics — Democrtat[ic] and Republican — let’s see if we can understand the prospects of self-criticism in an age of Citizen’s United. Specifically, do the respective political messages have anything to do with political patrons? Which is the more secure — the trust-funder or the struggling artist?

An even better question might be — for instance — if the Republican self-criticism Mr. Greenwald approves might have been meaningless. I suppose we could look at the recommendations for Republicans — outreach to minorities and the actual message their anointed candidate delivered of bigotry and xenophobia.

I’m tired of this ….

If you want to praise the Republicans and bury the Democrats, at least have the decency to declare your intent. This Maoist sort of self-criticism is ridiculous unless it also includes definitions of vague terms like “elite” or “establishment”, identification of power brokers within the respective parties, media collusion with political parties (I didn’t hear Fox doing a lot of self-criticism), the identification of patrons and policies, or other, non-political factors that could have had a huge effect on voting — from Wikileaks to local cultures.

It’s really disgusting to listen to a bunch Trump supporters (who will appear in the comments section spewing a bunch of vile undocumented nonsense designed to throw more dirt … because throwing is exactly how Republicans win elections — by throwing shitballs a the opposition. In 2004 they called it “swiftboating.” In 2009 – 2014 they called it “birtherism.” In 2015 and 2016 they called it “Trump.”

Dressing this crap as “Democrats’ blame-everyone-else posture” is more of the same skillful manipulation.

And most of us thought you were better than what you’ve spouting here since the election.

So given that you probably haven’t ever worked with or for the Clintons, or ever held high office in this country, or known the Clintons your entire adult life personally, or probably ever actually been involved in a campaign or been involved in the Democratic party apparatus at the highest levels– and Prof. Robert Reich has, does that make him a racists and/or misogynist, a Trump supporter or a Putin shill?

I mean I sure as fuck don’t see Prof. Reich strictly defining “elite” or “establishment” to make the same general point Glenn is making, do you?

You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it’s become – which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding.

Don’t bet on it.

For one thing, many vested interests don’t want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich of the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it that way.

For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years. . . . Insiders and the rich aren’t going to happily relinquish their power and perquisites, and hand them to outsiders and the non-rich.

Most Americans who call themselves Democrats never hear from the Democratic party except when it asks for money, typically through mass mailings and recorded telephone calls in the months leading up to an election. . . .
[snip]
So what we now have is a Democratic party that has been repudiated at the polls headed by a Democratic National Committee that has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of insider politicians. It has no deep or broad-based grass-roots, no capacity for mobilizing vast numbers of people to take any action other than donate money, no visibility between elections, no ongoing activism.
[snip]
In other words, ,to become a credible force that wins elections and addresses what ails America, the Democratic party must no longer represent America’s ruling class. I must be the voice of the dispossessed – now the majority of Americans.

You are really embarrassing yourself since the elections results came in. You’ve been commenting here for years, and yet you seem incapable of confronting what has been right in front of everyone for decades.

But yeah keep up your pathetic nit-picking about nothing, fail to accept that the Democratic Party stands for very little if it involves going against the wishes of their “elite” “establishment” funding apparatus, and continue to bury your head and continue to defend the indefensible (i.e what the Democratic party has become.)

Seriously good luck with that and see how that works out for you and the rest of your nominal allies be they “leftists/progressives/liberals”. My guess is about as well as its worked out when someone named Obama wasn’t on top of the ticket (a once in two, three or four generations politician–and he wasn’t all that and a bag of chips, but in the right place in the right time, not tainted by the Democratic party apparatus over a lifetime, running a near flawless campaign, and coming in right when the GOP was temporarily imploding after 8 years of unnecessary war(s).

Cato did not write that analysis, I did. And, I provided the text references and the quotations.Please read again and follow the references and tell me specifically where we went wrong. I spent hundreds of hours watching the use of our products in the OR. I was a medical school professor for 30 years. I saw the post-op results in patients with maiming conditions restored to normality. These things happened because of the labors of the respective physicians operating and the people in my laboratory and companies. I write whereof I know.

Please link to the thread you are referencing (or give the title of The Intercept article it appeared under) and I’ll take another look again.

. I spent hundreds of hours watching the use of our products in the OR. I was a medical school professor for 30 years. I saw the post-op results in patients with maiming conditions restored to normality.

That doesn’t sound to me like the statements or data that the medical profession, employing the scientific method, relies upon in deciding whether or not conclusions about X, Y, or Z are either “valid” or “repeatable”.

I’m going to need any underlying data collected (by you or whomever), peer reviewed articles on whatever issues are at play, and all the legal documents (i.e. pleadings, expert opinion reports, etc. etc.)

I don’t draw legal conclusions on what someone on the internet says they “witnessed 100s of hours of” or not.

I mean, seriously, you were a medical professor for 30 years and all you saw was a mealy “100s of hours of OR time”?

I’m not calling you a liar, but not only is your statement “anecdotal” and inadmissible as evidence in a products liability case, but I have serious concerns about any “medical school professor” whose only witnessed a few hundred hours of operating time over a 30 year career.

Now maybe you specialize in prosthetics or something, but I’d still think that sort of professor would have watched a whole lot more than “100s of hours of OR” time over a 30 year career just to understand the surgical methods employed and how they interact with a particular or prospective prescribed prosthesis.

In any event, still willing to look, but going to have to see what I asked for either by link or whatever. Not making any judgments, legal or otherwise, based on some article you wrote for Cato. Sorry, and genuinely don’t mean to be rude, but not how render an opinion in this arena.

But yeah keep up your pathetic nit-picking about nothing, fail to accept that the Democratic Party stands for very little if it involves going against the wishes of their “elite” “establishment” funding apparatus, and continue to bury your head and continue to defend the indefensible (i.e what the Democratic party has become.)

Again, I could go on but why? All democrats refuse to condemn themselves for their politics.

How strange.

Maybe all Democrats should hang a sign around their necks: “People say I’m bad so I must be bad.” (And if you say otherwise, you’re bad too.”)

Did you or anyone else notice the heed Republicans took of their own advice from their own “autopsy”?

Outreach to minorities.

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

“Criminals and rapists” isn’t exactly embracing and championing immigration reform. So GG commends republicans for their own self-criticism while condemning Democrats for not immediately bowing to the demands of Trump voters and shooting themselves for ineffectiveness.

This, while having won the popular vote by a couple of million votes.

So blame me for my discouraging words if you want, but as you say, I’m not in any leadership role in the Democratic party. I attend local caucuses and make my views know, but that’s about it.

I don’t do more because I believe in the decency of the American people. They would never, ever elect a clown so filled with bigotry and bile that he’s turned orange with it.

But I was wrong.

All the Republicans had to do was point and say, “crooked Hillary” collect a few emails from Russia via Wikileaks, have the head of the FBI imply there was reason to call her “crooked,” and — voila! — Jeff Sessios will replace Loretta Lynch.

And then. afterwards, demand that all Democrats agree that the American people prefer an unrepentant segregationist politician from Alabama to a career prosecutor from New York.

What a bunch of shit!

Put the blame where it belongs. The people who voted for Trump are responsible for Trump’s election..

Seriously, how many times are you going to host up this straw man just to knock it down.

First, the voters who voted for Trump are to “blame” for Trump being elected. That’s how elections work. Presumably we agree on that.

Two, who gives a fuck about the popular vote, you win enough electoral votes or you don’t win. You don’t like that, try and change it.

But neither of those issues are really the question, no matter how much you deflect or break out your hay cart full of straw men.

The question is — what is it going to take for the Democratic party to appeal to and motivate, some increased percentage of their nominal self-identified “base”, who not so shockingly didn’t come out to vote for Hillary Clinton in the numbers necessary to yield a victory, and second how do we reach 5-10% of the American voting public who doesn’t ever bother to vote year in and year out. That’s the problem no matter how hard you are trying not to understand it.

So, are you capable of grasping that simple concept or are you really that obtuse? The Democratic Party is simply not appealing to or motivating a segment of its own nominal “base” election to election. And you’d think you’d want to know why if you actual care about winning elections. Maybe you don’t. I do.

If you deny that, you’re not 1/10 as smart as I used to think you were. It’s a simply fact supported by data. You can continue to blame voters as lazy or feckless or whatever you want–but that doesn’t change the reality that you have to do something to appeal, motivate and compel them to come out and vote for you. And that means you have to ask yourself, why even in the face of a lunatic and megalomaniac you still can’t appeal to them or motivate them to vote for your candidate and against theirs.

And finally, there is a ridiculously large potential pool of American “non-voters” to draw from, that if polling is anything even remotely accurate, are generally sympathetic to the policy positions and/or agenda of the Democratic Party if they party could actually appeal to them, motivate them, and then fucking deliver on those promises. Again, are you simply too obtuse to understand you don’t need to get all of them, but a relative small percentage and you win elections going away.

Because here’s another truth, Donald Trump and the GOP is, generally speaking,–maxing out its potential turn-out every election. They are basically peaked out demographically even with the increased rural turn-out this election, and still that only amount to about 25-30% of the potential American electorate at most. So there’s 70% of the electorate up for grabs and you have to figure out how to get a relative small portion of them–and you win.

So you can sit around and blame whomever you choose, but none of that will change the reality that — the Democratic party isn’t entitled to anyone’s vote, ever, and if they don’t figure out a way to reach some increased portion of their potential pool of the American electorate, then they will continue to lose elections.

Seriously, I used to think you were fairly intelligent over the years. But you’ve completely lost the sight of what the real issue is. And of course it is a legitimate debate to argue alternatives, strategy and tactics, but “the problem” isn’t going to change for the Democratic party no matter how you’d like to not face it, wave it away, or blame it on someone other than the party apparatus that can’t even defeat Donald fucking Trump because it can’t turn out enough voters to do so.

Well, dear–if ONLY the voters are responsible, why hire campaign professionals? Hell, do away with them and with the Super Duper PACS as well, and the TV ads and the celebrity endorsements. And why should Hillary or any candidate worry about bad optics or gaffes or missteps?

Why keep polishing turds?

And might I add– YOU are the one responsible for your dog-with-a-bone attitude, no one else.

Ok, but let’s not slam the guy against the opposite wall. He has some good points, such as down ballot races which, TBH, Dems and everyone else neglect. As Washington gets ever more polarized, we would be smart to take issues on which most people actually do agree on to the states first.

Peck away at fundamental truths, little by little over the decades. That’s how Repugs got so consistent a message. As abhorrent as much of their platform is, at least they work at it consistently. Even lies become reality when repeated enough with that nose-to-the-grindstone approach. Is that too lowbrow for the Dem party? That attitude just solidifies the white working class’ perception of Dems as aloof.

That is what Dems can take away from this: state the message first, and make the other side answer to it. Instead, Dems got distracted and sidetracked and spent too much time defending and blaming.

That being said… I don’t think the Dem party is in shambles. Maybe in need of a tune-up.

Holy Hosanna!, Milton. You think that’s Glenn’s intent here? Did we read the same piece, or is there a different version in your world?

Seriously, is it not reasonable to wish that the Democratic Party high donors would do something better at this point than assemble with David Brock to figure out how to “kick Trump’s ass”? And, if Brock isn’t part of the party elite I don’t know who else would be.

Is it too much to ask for Democratic party operatives to wonder what they might have contributed to their own defeat? Sure, point a bunch of fingers around at the circumstance(s) that didn’t work in your favor, but – Hell’s Bells!! – have a touch of humility such that one could imagine they’re shouldering some of the blame themselves.

If ever there was a time for tantrums, this might be it – and, yours is a particularly sophisticated one. But there is also a time for some serious analysis WITHIN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY that they fucked up – and evidence of the same. Despite/ In spite of/ To spite Citizen’s United, the party still needs voters. The Democrats did not get them. Their first question should be why the hell not, and railing at the carousel of villains and scapegoats isn’t getting that question answered.

And, all that flailing around isn’t going to address a potentially LARGER problem of the political situation in the states which, if reports are true, are one or two state legislatures away from being able to amened the Constitution unopposed.

I despair, Milton. Glenn’s criticising the Democrats for their inability/unwillingness to confront their ineptitude isn’t the cause of my despair. But, people willing to paper over, turn a blind eye on, waltz away from, eschew the failures – writ large – of the party is.

I despair, Milton. Glenn’s criticising the Democrats for their inability/unwillingness to confront their ineptitude isn’t the cause of my despair.

As you know, I also despair.

I don’t think it’s wrong to criticize Democrats for losing the election (even if HRC received the most votes.)

I object to the idea of a static condition — Democrats this, Republicans that. I especially resent the headlined claim that Republicans engaged in meaningful self-criticism.

They pandered to racist voters (as usual since 1968), they cried about a crappy economy (which they destroyed and which isn’t nearly as bad as they claim), they slandered Clinton with specious allegations of various unproved and officially dismissed crimes (going back to the murder of Vince Foster). and they relied upon stolen emails provided by (apparently) Russia via Wikileaks.

Any yet, despite these characteristic dirty tricks going back as far as the Nixon administration, people want to blame the Democrats for tiptoeing through Republican territory?

I say, first accept these facts:

1. Politics is a dynamic competition — more of a wrestling match than an archery contest. What is true one day will be reversed the next.

2. The list of Republican dirty tricks in campaign and in performance of actual official duties (abuse of power) shows a lack of ethics, honesty, and decency. There is no corresponding body of shenanigans routinely practiced by Democrats.Benghazi and Iran-Contra aren’t not remotely similar “investigations.”

3. There is much to criticize about Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Clintonism and the blind loyalty of party operatives. But if you must criticize these ten days after a surprising and traumatic defeat, at least have the decency to identify the acts and people rather than blaming all Democrats (for whom much of this criticism is both inaccurate and further supportive of Republican grandstanding.)

4. Though apparently many people haven’t figured this out yet, the old rules don’t apply. The US has become an oligarchy, a servant of corporate and commercial interests. This reality belongs to both parties. Saying one party should ignore Citizen’s United while the other swims in Citizen’s United is just plain stupid.

These are my true observations (obviously.)

I offer you what should be the new American national anthem:

“Look mummy, there’s an aeroplane up in the sky”

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the
promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue
sky?

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
The flames are all gone, but the pain lingers on.

2) so what, if you can’t compete with the other side’s “lies” whose fault is that?, are you suggesting there is no viable path to electoral success if the other side is willing to lie? If so how fucking defeatist and if true then prepare to be in the electoral wildness forever and kiss America goodbye because clearly the GOP has no compunction about lying, peddling their own reality, or giving a shit about much of anything that does yield tangible benefits to themselves–that’s political reality;

3) nobody is suggesting “all democrats” are at fault, we’re arguing that the establishment/elite power brokers who set the parameters of tactics, strategy and message are;

4) of course the “old rules” apply, when wasn’t America at any time in its history not an “oligarchy”? and yes that’s a “bipartisan” oligarchy. that’s the point, if you aren’t prepared to go to battle against it directly, and against both sides as opposed to getting into bed with “your” Democratic party “oligarchs” thinking you’re changing the dynamic of oligarchy rather than passing it over periodically to the “other side of the oligarchy coin”, then give up, because, again, what’s the point. Do you actually think “your oligarchs” have your “interests” in mind (if so maybe marginally, but if you think it is anything more than “marginally” then I’d suggest you pull your head out of your ass because your idea that we live in an oligarchy is self-refuting to your idea that the Democratic party is anything other than marginally different than the GOP oligarchy–in fact they are largely the same.)

Jesus you are really really losing it.

Really there are two kinds of people in the world who participate in any sort of competition, whether it be sports or electoral politics, and who actually care about winning:
1) the people who when they lose blame everything but themselves or concede that the other guy is better at “the game” and does nothing different to try and change the outcome of the next match content to lose again, and again, and again, and again;

2) the people who when they lose, look to themselves and say, “what do I have to do better or differently, not just to compete, but to actually win in the future and defeat the guy(s) that have been kicking my ass consistently.”

Nobody disagrees with you about how the Republican party has always had its fingers in lots of rotten little pies… But the problem is that they’ve had a lot of practice.

When the DNC started thinking that it could treat its base like the RNC does (easily-led sheep), they got an extremely rude awakening: the DNC has more goats than sheep. As the wonderful Terry Pratchett once said: “For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.”

Unfortunately, the DNC themselves don’t seem to understand the fundamental difference in thought between the bases of the two parties, and seem to be setting up to make the same mistakes again.

Nobody disagrees with you about how the Republican party has always had its fingers in lots of rotten little pies… But the problem is that they’ve had a lot of practice.

While I’m extremely happy that someone else in the world recognizes this, I see no evidence of “Nobody disagrees …”

For instance read this sentence from the lead paragraph:

After the 2012 election, the GOP immersed itself in unflinching self-critique even though it still held a majority in both houses of Congress and dominated governorships and state houses.

Do you include the writer of this sentence among “nobody believes …”?

I find this a patently untrue description of what Republicans did after losing the presidential election in 2012. Instead they used their power in state legislatures to pass voter ID laws expressly designed to mitigate the voting impact of the minorities.

I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.

Does this sound like a party engaged in “an unflinching self-critique”?

It sounds to me like a party that when confronted with a growing minority electorate they decided to find ways to exclude that growing population.

In short, far from being “an unflinching self-critique” as GG describes it, it was really a bunch of spectacular bullshit designed to hide their real intent.

Did you think when Donald Trump mentioned the wretched conditions in American inner cities he actually intended to spend the billions of dollars on infrastructure and education programs necessary to remediate this national disgrace? I don’t.

Do you think that when Donald Trump promised to deport 11 million people of Hispanic descent — the criminals and rapists though some are probably nice people — that he heard “an unflinching self-critique” of Republicans reaching out to minorities … or did he sniff political opportunity?

Do you blame the Democrats who had their emails hacked by Russia for thinking about how to win an election? Do you think the emails published by Wikileaks were designed to provide a fair and honest picture of the inner workings of the Democratic upper echelon? The people criticizing me — and more importantly the author of this article — all seem to think selectively published hacked emails represent a true and accurate picture of Democratic elites.

Do you think any honest observer of American politics should ignore the dirty tricks, lies, appeals to bigotry, slanders and more displayed by Republicans?

Apparently those calling me names and enraged by my expectation of accuracy on the part of Mr. Greenwald believe I’m out of line for daring to suggest an Intercept heresy: that rather than craven and out of touch and elitist Democrats maybe — just maybe — the collective weight of the lies, half-truths, misinformation, slanders, collusion with Russia, and voter repression had more to do with the failure of Clinton’s campaign than the Democrats themselves.

It’s easy to blame the loser for losing. Just pick your political meme and spray away the fair play.

I really mean it when I say I appreciate your acknowledgement of Republican’s dirty tricks. I think you’re rather blind to the reality of it though.

Look for condemnation of it in the press. You won’t find much it — maybe in some rather sterile patches of honesty — and always without assessment of its electoral impact.

Did Comey swing the election for Clinton as I saw headlined at Huffpo (I think)? Here at the Intercept that claim would be evidence of Democrats in denial and the cluelessness of the elite. I think it’s a legitimate question. I don’t have an opinion on its validity — unlike the rest of the mob here.

So, if you want to discount the evidence of Republican dirty tricks through the years — something so obvious that “nobody believes” differently — I ask you and others why.

(Not why I am a shithead, but why the role of Republican dirty tricks, voter suppression and appeals to bigotry are left out of the equation. And if any of you dare say “only the outcome matters” then guess what. You just joined the Democratic elite.)

I think the Republicans did engage in meaningful self-criticism. That they, then, failed to operate as if they hadn’t done so doesn’t negate the validity of their autopsy. Yeah; Hillary got the most votes… that and a $1 will get you…. C’mon, Milton. She and her coterie were supposed to be *experts* at this game. As details emerge, it seems far from true that there was an outstanding level of expertise; but she and her campaign were in charge. Would that Democrats had done more than tip-toe into the regional areas Trump has claimed.

I can accept #1. It’s especially true given #4. My question is why the vaunted Clinton-Machine didn’t recognize the truth of it. It wasn’t me making the early observation that the DNC was clearing the field and rolling out the carpet for a Clinton coronation, and the hazards of the same. That was Charles Pierce.

#2 is a little trickier. Some of this is accurate, but it’s not just me who has recognized the ethical inadequacies of the GOP since – at least – Nixon, in my lifetime. But, don’t ask me to accept being actively conned by the Democrats as a defense in the same breath.

#3. Oh, fucking, please. Civility vs decency? Others have done it a lot better than I could. And, I see no need for Greenwald to catalog what’s already widely circulating all over the web, here. His point is different than that, and it’s a reasonable point to make.

You may not like that Glenn has had the temerity to haul the Democrats up by their shorts as they machine gun blame everywhere, and hold themselves harmless. But, it’s not unreasonable for him to cut to the chase of it all. Midterms are, effectively, already underway. If there is any hope of putting a dent in Trump’s plans, that effort begins now. The Democrats – like it or not – do not fucking have the luxury or the comfort of denial/deflection/obfuscation/dissembling/elision. Unless, of course, it’s all a game they genuinely don’t care if they play well, as long as all their own sinecures are guaranteed.

All the sniping aside, I would hope that you and I can also agree that – whatever else – the Democrats are required to climb down off their rarefied coastal peaks and address the needs and worries of that big honkin’ space known as fly-over country. This may be the only time I’m inclined to defend the Electoral College. Maybe it’s fair that those over-represented folks had an opportunity to say, We and our communities are not disposable. Glad the world’s working okay for you, but you don’t get to just leave us behind., which is what I, personally, think Trump’s win is mostly about.

All the sniping aside, I would hope that you and I can also agree that – whatever else – the Democrats are required to climb down off their rarefied coastal peaks and address the needs and worries of that big honkin’ space known as fly-over country. This may be the only time I’m inclined to defend the Electoral College. Maybe it’s fair that those over-represented folks had an opportunity to say, We and our communities are not disposable. Glad the world’s working okay for you, but you don’t get to just leave us behind., which is what I, personally, think Trump’s win is mostly about.

Yes, I know the saying: victory has a thousand noble fathers while defeat is a hopeless bastard who should have been strangled in the crib. Something like that.

I wouldn’t dispute your theory in the main. I’m confident many who voted for Trump feel exactly as you describe.

It’s understandable that voters expect something in return for their votes.

Yet reality must play a role in perceptions.

For instance, how about an infrastructure bill that sends money to these deprived flyover states?

Nope:

$478B Infrastructure Bill Blocked by Senate GOP

How about block grants to allow these deprived states to pay for ACA?

Nope.

Republican Governors May Pay Price for Refusing to Expand Medicaid Under Obamacare

Maybe unemployment benefits for workers left behind in these deprived states?

Nope.

Republicans have once again blocked an extension of benefits intended to aid the long-term unemployed.

(All these citations can be googled. Perhaps an entry notation convention of “GI” — meaning Google It — should begin. Anyone interested enough to click a link can just as easily open a new browser.)

Anyway, your premise might be accurate despite the evidence, but again, why blame Democrats for the public votes of Republicans?

When you frame it as blaming those bicoastal “liberal elites” then you’re just carrying water for the Republicans. When GG says the Republicans engaged in “unflinching self-criticism” another obvious untruth carries more bucketsful or using selectively published hacked emails to define the Democratic elite simply succors Trump voters. This is not pretense. Hacked emails count as “bad acts.”

And while HRC can be criticized for many things (see some of my posts before October at the Guardian), I think that repeating Republicans talking points — e.g:

In sum, there is a large list of fundamental, systemic problems with virtually every aspect of the Democratic Party.

even if entirely true makes correction more difficult rather than less so. You might as well say that because people drown in the ocean sharks don’t matter. They’re unflinching vegetarians, unlike those, you know, carnivorous people.

Objective explanations for objective phenomena shouldn’t be so clearly weighted to benefit one interested party rather than another interested party.

I forgot to mention that the Democrats allying themselves with our celeb-rotten culture didn’t help. (But then politicians and entertainers both tend toward narcissism and thus feel a kinship.)

Featuring supercilious Hollywood stars endorsing your candidate or TV personalities like the unappealing, callow entity, Lena Dunham, is not a smart move when so many of the hoi polloi are feeling economically downtrodden. Having the obscenely rich laud you at $100,000.00 per couple fundraising dinners is not exactly an inducement for the poor and middle class to gift you with their votes.

If anything, the endorsements of the glitterati “limousine liberals” probably did more harm than good.

How could Springsteen throw the subjects of all his best stuff(the people of the USA)under the Hell Bitch bus?
The poor working stiffs who race at night in the rust belt caused by globalization are not worthy of defense?Greasy Lake is yuppie territory?The River is now lawyer land?
HRC is at Bellevue?A kidnapped handicapped?
The Utah desert is now demoncratic?
Such is the isolation of the overpaid.

In a predominantly blue state I went through the entire primary+general election cycle without seeing a single yard sign for her. I would have expected to see hundreds or thousands of such signs.

To be more precise, I never saw a Hillary sign in a yard or by the roadside. I did see hundreds of them at party meetings and union halls where Hillary’s thin upper crust were trying to give them away.

Well, there’s a word for what Mr. Greenwald is describing: denial. And whether or not we want to acknowledge it, our entire nation is, in one way or another, under a stupor of denial on multiple levels and issues. It’s not just the Democratic party, although what just unfolded this election cycle was a real doozy of an example on their part. And I see nothing indicating that the citizens in this country are ready to look in the mirror at themselves as well, and take responsibility for complicity in the mess we’ve wrought. This nation is morally stunted, filled with hubristic notions of its place in the world and what it’s “entitled” to, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. We’ve created a situation to get amplified feedback, until we “get it.” Thanks for your writing Mr. Greenwald.

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.” – W.H. Auden

But this is exactly what one would expect from a nation founded on the principle of freedom to make money. Now that most people here have it, they don’t give a damn about anything else. You can sit down in a cafe in any other developed country and have an intelligent political discussion with people around you, but in the U.S. if you try that you will offend people.

Just like people are not willing to live more simply and naturally to stop global warming/climate change and otherwise save our planet (even those who advocate for doing something just want a change in technologies, which will help some but isn’t nearly enough for reasons I won’t go into here), Americans will see their country go up in flames before they become more politically interested.

Mr. Greenwald – as a grateful reader of your Snowden articles in the Guardian back in June 2013 – I did email you months ago that the USA intelligence apparatus was involved in the 2012 election from my own personal experiences and this was Republican advantage based for sure in 2012 prior to and after the 2012 election without question and without doubt. Based on my own experiences I knew exactly to the moment the extremely high probability of Booz Allen Hamilton – NSA contractor to be complicit in North Carolina politics when a consultant to the firm was hired to be in charge of NC’s IT system January 2013 by newly elected governor Pat McCrory.

Furthermore – it was perfectly obvious of FBI Mr. Comey’s intent with his release 11 days before the election.

As much as I am grateful for the Snowden releases and quote from a letter to USDOJ – July 2011 – “As I have read the FBI has concerns with other government agencies using their surveillance technology. I am also aware through the FBI itself that if they investigated would not tell me if I was wired tapped. Due to the sophistication it could be NSA, Military intelligence or out side contractors.”
The USA domestic targeting continues for me into 2016 as also emailed to you so perhaps you should get some of your own facts and bias straight. My targeting includes blocking of theguardian.com in Greensboro, NC for the 1st five days of 2016 by Time Warner Cable and then pertinent emails altered to not show on up-to-date iPhones inboxes as well as deletion off MXLOGIC ARCHIVING owned under McAfee and Intel itself. And that does not take into account physical stalking for 6 years including tractor trailer hit attempts Republican based! And please understand I do not appreciate or condone the President Obama’s administration continuance of the damn domestic United States surveillance state. And please feel free to filter out or delete this post as the truth really hurts and no one can literally withstand the Consequences and Liabilities!

Your work as a journalist reporting on the surveillance state is far from finished – especially the domestic and partisan politics. I just hope to be alive for the next election – may not be so lucky to miss the hit attempts in the future! Ronald N. Day

The Democratic hierarchy are our modern day Bourbons: they learn nothing and they forget nothing.

That hierarchy essentially conceded the field to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms — which was a wipeout for Dems at the state and local level and resulted in the loss of the Dem majority in the House.

This was after Obama’s startling efforts to resuscitate the Republican Party after their own wipeouts in 2006 and 2008.

From that perspective, it doesn’t actually matter to the Democratic Party hierarchy whether they win or lose any given election. They will always be secure, so what’s to worry.

Like almost everyone else, however, they did expect Hillary to win the presidency, and like almost everyone else, they’re in shock that she didn’t. The curious thing is that they accepted it without question, despite the razor thin margins in several states, and the fact that votes weren’t actually tabulated yet. Every other time there have been questionable results, there have been questions. Not this time.

What questionsble results? Where are they? Trump has 50% + win in more than 20 states. Clinton has a clear lead in fewer than 15 – and her leads are, overall, smaller than his. Maybe six states are razor thin and most of those have 5% 3rd party votes that likely cost Trump more than Hillary.

What questionable results?Razor thin,or very close margins worked for both candidates in various states.
The only question I would have is the weird voters in both coasts voting for a career criminal f*ckup like HRC.
And they call republicans low info voters?
Such is the power of zion to sway the gullible.

I haven’t seen a democrat on a local ballot in decades.
They don’t even try.
My ballot this year was 80% unopposed races.
I only got to actually vote for President , Senator, and County Commissioner.
All other races were unopposed republicans.
My lazy ass, non functional republican representatives have somehow gotten tenure.
It is because the DNC has chosen a route of racial profiling and the use of racial division as a foundation of their party.
New York (DNC Headquarters) has the most segregated schools in the Nation
not Mississippi, not Alabama, not Texas.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/26/new-york-schools-segregated_n_5034455.html
The only effective strategy the DNC has had in three decades is to try to change the complexion of America by inciting illegal immigration.
The DNC has failed the American people and will continue to try to divide.
A broken, dishonest, racist, and divisive DNC is bad for the country.
It leaves the RNC unopposed.

The Republicans may have done an autopsy, but they misjudged the cause of death. They lost again in 2016 – to Trump. He defeated both parties. The inability of both Republicans and Democrats to understand what happened goes back to the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The donors to the parties – the ruling class – are the ones paying the politicians’ salaries.

Most Americans have realized, consciously or subconsciously, that the two parties don’t really represent them, but instead represent the ruling class. Obama seemed like an outsider; so did Trump. Neither of them is, really, but that’s how they won. For either party to become more popular, they need policies that are popular with the masses. But then they’d risk losing their funding from the 1%.

You pretty much nailed it. We need proportional representation, an end to private campaign financing (public funds only in equal amounts to all qualifying candidates), free & equal TV time for all candidates, and a parliamentary system to replace the tyrannical executive system under which we suffer. Those remedies would fix all of the problems that you identified.

Once the Primary ended, I remember the media’s meme being “the Sanders supporters will come over to Clinton just like they did for Obama in ’08” which was a false equivalency. Obama ran a very progressive campaign based on change, which is similar to what Bernie’s message was. In ’08 people who were backing Clinton ended up voting for Obama and the change he campaigned on. But Clinton does not represent change. She is homage to the established system that has led to the demise of the blue collar class. Had Clinton beaten Obama in ’08, she very likely may have lost to McCain, considering he got 2 million more votes than Trump did.
The Dems can’t claim to be the good guys while being in bed with the donor class. They need to be champions for political integrity if they want to win with Millennials going forward. Folks like Joe Mansion have no place in the Democratic Party. He and the other corporate Dems need to admit that they’re really Republicans and leave the party.

and what did HRC immediately do after the convention? Run down to Florida to publicly nurse DWS’s boo boos and tell her (and every progressive with a brain) ‘f those Bernie people, you know I’m just playing them’. Then spent the rest of the campaign ‘reaching out’ to suburban Repubs. The same repubs who have made it clear for years that they completely hate her (not without reason). And gee, she loses largely due to not turning out the real left, and getting jack from the repub ‘soccer moms’ . SO STOOPID. And we get stuck with the mess, while she still can’t even claim the slightest responsibility for the disaster. Poor, poor HRC, all she has is those piles of money to cry into…
OH, and great job, GG, as usual.

I was relieved to see that you’d included this: One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination…. Although, I’m unconvinced that any of the GOP candidates who first took the stage with Trump were any indication that they reflected the recommendations of the RNC’s autopsy report.

I’m not sure why the Democratic elite are – apparently – constitutionally unable to engage in some honest self-reflection, but I fear it’s indicative of the incapacity of the party as it exists. If it persists, I don’t imagine it will take very long for those state level party workers to become disenchanted and disaffected from the national entity. The Democratic party risks more than just losing voters for national elections.

As any number of sources reported, it would have been unusual for a party to have pulled off an additional executive term. The odds were against 2016, regardless, of candidate. Pitting a solidly establishment Democrat against a supposed populist (at least Trump appealed to some populist instincts – independent of the basest among them), given the anti-establishment mood of the electorate, was a blunder of the first order. Were it not for the dire consequences, it would have been enjoyable to watch them choke on their hubris.

Apart from the contest for the executive, what is more alarming is the status of state level governance. And, it is alarming. Where does the Democratic party imagine their congressional representatives will come from? Or, is it the case that they will just choose them from a list of mid-level donors – carpetbag them into relevant states – and tell the voters, This is your choice. That ought to work out well.

The selection of the next DNC chair is going to tell me just about everything I’m going to need to know going forward. If that choice doesn’t signal some real change, 2018/2020 will be a blood bath.

And the winner is…CHUCK SCHUMER! So, indeed, 2018/2020 are likely to be bloodbaths. I’m glad I’m old and probably won’t be around to witness the totality of the catastrophic downfall, but I despair for my children and grandchild(ren).

One irony of 2016 is that the candidate who won the GOP nomination, and ultimately the presidency, not only ignored many of the autopsy’s core recommendations but embodied everything it warned against. Nonetheless, the reaction of Republican officials after 2012 was to accept responsibility for their loss, admit their own fundamental errors, and vow to fix what was wrong with themselves: the exact antithesis of the instinct Democrats have thus far displayed in the face of a much more sweeping and crushing defeat.

Cold comfort, Glenn. I thought Trump a clear repudiation of the GOP candidates (as much DNC-chosen Mrs. Status Que.) baby Bush, ‘lyin Ted Cruz, etc., etc. .. so whatever introspective reflection the GOPers did didn’t work very well, imo.
*Which Is Not to say the GOPers will not take full advantage of the President-elect Trumps windfall. On the contrary.

Back in the Bush years, Stephen Colbert made a joke – reality has a well-known liberal bias.

In the decade or so since then, the left in this country has taken that joke and twisted it and inverted it, taken it to mean that American Democratic bias is reality.

Clinton had earned it? Well, therefore it’s her turn. The attacks on Clinton are bullshit? Well, the public hasn’t figured that out over 25 years, surely they’ll figure it out in the next six months. Clinton called 25% of the electorate deplorable? See, if you read her whole speech, really, she’s talking about the other Trump voters and blah blah blah. Trump has no path but through the Midwest? Well, we better allocate more resources to Texas and Omaha than we do to Michigan and Wisconsin, because this is so in the bag we need to run up the score.

Reality has no interest in conforming itself to your worldview. It’s time for the American left to figure that out.

What specious math. Fewer than 1 in 4 American adults selected drumpf to be so much as dog-catcher, and there you go with the 25% deplorable number. That figure is about 12%, if we take HRC’s words literally.

And piss on them. 12% of the country’s population are backwoods no-nothing jock-culture-embracing Breitbart-reading morons. I submit 12% is a conservative estimate of their number. One of the D problems is an hubristic attempt to appeal to the better angels of those scum. Fuck em.

As for the American left – your equating with the left with the Democratic Party makes you semi-literate at best, a right-wing troll-bot at worst. Aren’t you in the comments section of an article which details specifically the D party’s failure to reflect the left?

It’s fine if you agree with her about that – I certainly do – but it was still politically an incredibly stupid thing to do. That’s why I’m upset about it. People want to focus on “Well, here’s what she really meant” instead of “Here’s something incredibly politically stupid said by the person who is supposed to be so great a politician that her presidency is inevitable.”

And I’m sorry if you don’t like me conflating terms that you don’t think should be conflated, but if you don’t consider the Samantha Bees and Jamelle Bouies and all the commentators of their ilk to be viewed as the left in this country, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t feel like getting into a no-true-Scotsman argument.

In Glenn’s link, which he noted with the word “hagiography,” the following can be found:

There is something Rebecca Traister wrote in her terrific profile of Clinton… –Ezra Klein

This is part of what Traistor wrote:

workaholic woman [Clinton] who knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic,–Rebecca Traistor

I can’t say with certainty if Hillary Clinton is lying or ignorant about her lack of knowledge about Edward Snowden in regards to the Whistle Blower Protection Act, and also about “the documents falling into the wrong hands,” but her public statements about it show her to be quite the opposite of “a woman who knows policy inside and out.” She expresses total ignorance about the Whistle Blower Protection Act in regards to Snowden. She also repeats the bogus BS about Snowden allowing the documents to “fall into the wrong hands.” The true information about each of those subjects is easy for any citizen of the world to learn of, know and to pass on to others. But in each case Hillary Clinton either doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she is lying about what she knows and or doesn’t know.

This New Yorker article by John Cassidy tells of her false diatribes about each of those subjects expressed by her in a debate. Clinton is quoted as repeating, as Glenn put it and is quoted from the article, “the same slimy innuendo against Snowden that’s been used for months about her emails.” Glenn is addressing the “fell into the wrong hands” garbage.

Cassidy covers that, and he also covers quotes from her about her incorrect take on Snowden and the Whistle Blower Protection Act:

Finally, what about Clinton’s claim that some of the information Snowden took from the N.S.A. has “fallen into a lot of wrong hands”? The assertion echoed a report, published in June by the Sunday Times, which quoted anonymous officials in the British government who said that Russia and China had decrypted some of the files taken by Snowden, prompting MI6, the U.K.’s foreign-intelligence service, to pull agents out of several countries. At this stage, though, there has been absolutely no confirmation of this allegation, nor even that Russia or China obtained any of the classified material that Snowden accumulated.

And:

Evidently, Clinton disagrees [about the effect of WPA for Snowden]. In saying that Snowden should have invoked “all of the protections of being a whistle-blower,” she was repeating an argument that President Obama has made. But it doesn’t withstand inspection. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which provided legal immunity to government employers who reveal lawbreaking, malfeasance, or abuse of authority, doesn’t apply to employees of the intelligence agencies, including contractors like Snowden. These workers are covered by the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistle Blower Protection Act; but, as, Michael German, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out, in 2013, “it is no more than a trap.”

German explained that the 1998 act set up a procedure for employees of the intelligence agencies to report wrongdoing to Congress via the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General. But the legislation didn’t fully protect whistle-blowers from internal reprisals or subsequent prosecutions. “Reporting internally through the ICWPA only identifies the whistleblowers, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation,” he noted. “The examples of former NSA official Thomas Drake, former House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark and former CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa show [this] too well.” (In 2011, my colleague Jane Mayer wrote a long piece about Drake, who was charged under the Espionage Act.)

It’s contradictory that Hillary Clinton could be fully ignorant of this knowledge but be considered as “a woman who knows policy inside and out.” Is she ignorant of such important information, or is she pathologically dishonest, or some of each?

Going with some of each. And for decades her wonkiness and attention to detail is asking staff for bullet points and summaries. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but her insisting on selling the fake image is a revealing.

Democrats figure that empty virtue-signaling, demonizing the opposition, and pandering to various blocs of the electorate will always be a winning strategy somehow, even if they lose because “the arc of history,” doncha know.

What I thought was incredibly stupid was the deprecation, the insulting of the voters themselves, the “basket of deplorables” and “irredeemable” remarks Hillary made as well as the insults her campaign hurled at the Bernie supporters. Insult your opponent but never insult your opponent’s supporters. You may need them on election day.

So you are saying the republicans are doing something right since they are winning?
Why do you think the voters are rewarding the GOP?
Do anyone serve wall st. more eagerly than the GOP?
Isn’t the dem party the same one that was victorious in the last presidential elections?
Did they change since 2012?
Or is this Obama just finding out the rest of the country doesn’t share his infatuation with the Clintons?

Couple of thoughts is you never exactly tell the reader why the people of the republican party felt they did not belong to it in 2012.Was it perhaps the same reasons that today democrats feel they do not belong to their party? or that the top echelons of respective parties do in fact have two agenda- one for the public and one for the investors.

The democratic party is very split today and it is two parties with two opposing agenda – one being a Status Quo HRC, and the other Bernie Sanders anti banking,and corporate agenda.Having a Senator Chuck Schumer as Dem. Minority Leader is only a huge continual divide of the party and what it will stand for in the future.Another way this party is not owning up to why and how they lost and have continually lost support throughout the country. HRC did not resonate with the people of today with her same old rhetoric.The message continues to be the wrong message.

This party needs a make over if not a split to a third party to give the people the message they are seeking, want, and should have and must have as a nation: It’s about US – The People

She WON the popular vote. Bernie would have been eviscerated by Bannon. Trump ran through the GOPs entire bench in the primary. Too much navel gazing by them is what caused them to LOSE. You have to stop letting your grudges cloud your judgment.

She won the popular vote because she won the large urban areas. But she couldn’t win enough states, so she lost the electoral college.

For the purpose of this article, it doesn’t matter that she won the popular vote. We’ll never know whether Sanders would have beaten Trump unless it’s Sanders v. Trump in 2020, but Sanders was polling a lot better against every Republican candidate than Clinton and was extremely popular among independents, which are actually more people than Democrats or Republicans.

Many of us warned before the primaries even started that Clinton was so well-hated that she could lose to anyone, and that’s what happened. Hatred of Clinton comes from both the left and the right, and those on the left have damn good reason to hate her (militaristic, neoliberal, supports Wall Street over Main Street, etc., while the hatred from the right is mainly the immoral sexist/misogynist crap). It’s no surprise to me that Clinton lost, though to be honest I didn’t see how Trump could win either since he alienated so many people with his hateful speech.

Also there are talking heads wanting to / musing over ban the electoral college; that won’t solve anything… quite possibly could hasten another civil war (armed or unarmed). Recognize it was the elected few w/ higher minds than the mob who chose DJT. So, next, do we want to be a Republic or a Democracy? or do we want to have a country where only rich guys get to decide?

The whole thing is fucking ridiculous. More choices please. Wins by plurality rather than just majority.

I tried to warn my friends about how loathed Hillary was. It didn’t matter what the source was or if it was deserved or not, there was a visceral dislike of her, moving to outright hate as you moved more to the right.

The Democratic answer to this seemed to be, “Well, it’s all false and they shouldn’t feel that way.” That was pretty much it – a sort of blind faith that that it’s not true should be enough to carry the candidate. That somehow by pointing out how feeling otherwise was wrong or sexist or racist or whatever would be enough to sway the very people they were calling sexist or racist or whatever (when sadly, and quite obviously, the reverse would be true).

Yes, though Hillary has a huge swath of flaws, there were many ugly things thought, said, and done that were unfair and untrue that undoubtedly impacted the outcome, but it was obvious from the beginning that she was vulnerable to exactly these sorts of attacks. That alone made her a bad choice, even if in a more fair world it might not be true (as we see, reality didn’t care). However the Democratic party lived on the basis of what things (at least in their mind) *should* be, and seemed to ignore what they *could* or *would* be. Hillary *should* be elected president, so she *would* be elected president.

I wonder if instead of deriding Facebook for publishing negative false news to conservatives, they should be also deriding Facebook, and the rest of the press, for only exposing liberals to what was also in retrospect false news as well. That is, the endless stream of hagiography expressing not only the inevitability of Hillary, but the impending downfall and doom of the Republican party due to the polarizing nature of Trump.

I don’t know how many sites predicted a doom, not only for Trump, but potentially the Senate if not the House as well. That Republicans would be swelling over to Hillary – the same Republicans who loathed her since Bill started his presidency.

I warned not to count the chickens before they hatch, that Republicans always seem to find a way, that they would come around when they had to. Still I have to admit it was more stunning than I even expected. I too had been pulled in by the endless propaganda – I thought she would win, but instead of a win, or anything resembling the oft repeated route, it was the opposite. Today instead we wonder if the Democrats have a future.

I think that the dynamic that you are seeing is what rallied supporters to the Democrat party in the first place. There is a culture of dependency, blame shifting, entitlement, and dare I say elitism, in the party, which draws people who support those values into the party. It shouldn’t be a surprise then, when things don’t go their way, that the party exhibits those tendencies.

The clear contrast in the Republicans is one of self-reliance, introspection, and helping one’s neighbors. The two parties couldn’t be more divided on these principles.

Yeah except the “red states” that make up the GOP “base” are “culturally dependent” and anything but “self-reliant” and the highest users of government benefits programs (i.e. welfare what’s left of it and disability), and most subsidies (agricultural and corporate).

And to suggest that overall, the GOP as a party is capable of “introspection” is laughable. Donald Trump did basically nothing that was consistent with the GOP autopsy report in 2012. He won in spite of it.

I was very worried about this exact thing happening. At one point I thought we might could change the party with a loss, then the neo-McCarthy tactics began after wikileaks. I knew then that they would be too self righteous and concerned only with their own interest to try any soul searching. The Democrats are dead, and they just put a zombie at the head.

I’m for a new party even knowing it will most likely help Trump (gag), but at this moment there is no one representing a large portion of the population and continuing to reward this terrible behavior will only result in more losses to republicans.

On Facebook, i.e., at the individual level, all I see is shock and accusations of racism among Trump voters. Which is fine as far as that goes, but that isn’t very far. On the other side, it doesn’t help that every single Trump voter I see invokes nonexistent facts and anti-logic to support their cause.

At the party level, there is also just shock and dismay that common sense has lost its grip on the country. No concept that arguments need to be made and that maybe “She’s great” isn’t a political argument.

“every single Trump voter I see invokes nonexistent facts and anti-logic to support their cause”

It’s true, but it’s also true in many liberal circles you literally couldn’t express any concern about Hillary’s positions or history. While, yes, much of the negative press about Hillary was fiction, not all of it was. However many liberals blinded themselves to the convenient idea that because there was a lot of crying wolf, it must be all crying wolf. That there were many, many people who would describe her not only as their choice, but literally someone to be enthusiastic of (rather than a better, but extremely compromised). This shows that our side is equally accustomed to self-delusion.

I think this is where we fall down – we think our chosen side is always somehow “exceptional”. That somehow our side doesn’t have the same human flaws as the other side. Republicans are the party of delusion, we are the party of intellect and considered thought. Instead it’s all religion – faith based. We won’t allow self-doubt anymore than they will. Which of course goes to explain a lot of why we aren’t showing introspection here.

We need to realize the things we loath about Republicans, that they aren’t “reality based” are just as much a problem on our side as theirs. That to literally think otherwise would almost imply some sort of weird genetic difference.

The Republicans aren’t a different race, they are us and we are them, with all the same flaws that that implies.

All true that Dems need to have a hard look at themselves. They have become too cozy with corporations & too much D.C. Beltway. However at the same time it can be true that racism & sexism played a large part this election. These same rural voters would turn around to cut social programs that support minority communities. A lot of them have said that they stopped registering as Democrats because the party started focusing on a progressive agenda (e.g. civil rights, gun control).

I feel ignorance is being touted as a virtue. Why wasn’t Russ Feingold elected (as name recognition not an issue) despite being thchange” candidate? Why are these voters voting for candidates that will make their situation worse?

Wrong. Please read the essay I linked above, which refutes the whole racism/sexism/etc point. I think that the dynamic that you are seeing is what rallied supporters to the Democrat party in the first place. There is a culture of dependency, blame shifting, entitlement, and dare I say elitism, in the party, which draws people who support those values into the party. It shouldn’t be a surprise then, when things don’t go their way, that the party exhibits those tendencies.

In case you think this was written by a conservative, consider this passage: “Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later””

Urban areas vote demoncrat and sub, exurban and rural voters vote rethug.
California and NY are both Hell Bot urban vote dominated,where the majority of rural and exurban voters votes don’t count.
Talk about disenfranchised.
Every poor,minority dominated area went HB,a reflection of the rot among the brainwashed fools who can’t see that the demoncrats offer nothing to them but continued misery,joblessness,terrible schools,and no opportunities for a better future.

One could argue that the problems with the Democratic Party began with President Clinton. The control of Congress that was ushered in by President Roosevelt–under the Great Depression–ran out under Clinton’s administration. http://tinyurl.com/6rhg8mu

Right now, the Dems seem only to be rearranging the deck chairs on the “Titanic”.

Neo liberalism is dead, but the left has far from taken control. If progressive dems want to know what ahead for them they need only look at what Labour did to Corbyn. If Labour’s PLP wants to know whats ahead if they continue to buck their members and chase the neoliberal dream, they need only look at Clinton’s defeat.

To KD: You wrote “… the problems with the Democratic Party began with President Clinton. Well, he surely did not help, but in the late 70’s when the Democrats decided to aggressively go after corporate money did not help either.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Here are two other things that caused problems for the Democratic Party:

The first was about problems they brought upon themselves for doing what was right in pushing through Civil Rights legislature which cost them the South.

The second is if any Democrats were involved it a conspiracy to kill JFK that would have been the lesion created for a fatal disease to have entered into the body of our Democracy.

Agreed. Clinton was the worst of numerous Democratic candidates in 1992. He and his buddies convinced the Democratic Party to become more corporate-friendly in order to regain the White House, and the party has moved pretty far to the right ever since.

BTW, Bill Clinton was the candidate chosen by the ruling class well before the 1992 election. That’s why he, a Podunk governor from Arkansas, was invited to a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations before the election.